O’Melveny Entices Baker Botts’ Longtime Client Liberty Media

Liberty Media has shifted some work from long-time legal adviser Baker Botts in favor of California-founded O’Melveny & Myers, which has been working with billionaire John Malone’s company since at least March.

The switch comes alongside changes for Liberty Media, which last week approved a split of the Atlanta Braves into a separate, publicly traded entity.

“As Liberty’s business has evolved, we felt O’Melveny & Myers well serves current business needs,” Liberty Media said in a statement. The company owns Formula 1 and Sirius XM among other media, sports and entertainment holdings.

For Baker Botts, the shift in work affects a large client that has for decades provided reliable and recurring work. Baker Botts worked on large Liberty Media transactions last year, including the plan to split off the Atlanta Braves, but the number of transactions on which the firm has advised the company appears to have declined in recent months. The last time Baker Botts cited Liberty Media as a client was in November.

Baker Botts in previous years benefited from Liberty Media’s custom outsourcing model, in which it hired the firm to do a good amount of its legal work. “They function in many ways as part of our law department,” said Liberty’s former chief legal officer Rich Baer in a 2019 interview with the American Lawyer. That allowed Liberty to keep its in-house legal team small, with only four lawyers at the time, he said.

In 2019, Renee Wilm, who was previously a senior partner at Baker Botts for more than 22 years, took on the position of chief legal officer at Liberty.

Baker Botts declined to comment on the specifics of its engagements with Liberty Media. “Liberty is a valued client of the firm,” the firm said in a statement.

Baker Botts in June electedDanny David as its new managing partner. It has seen its headcount decline in recent years, attributed to other large firms entering the Texas legal market. Most of the lawyers in the running for the managing partner position said they would seek a merger with another firm to obtain the scale needed to ward off poachers and capture more of the deals market, sources told Bloomberg Law.

Liberty Content, Deals

Liberty Media’s sports holdings are successful sources of entertainment content, said Keith Herndon, a professor at the University of Georgia College of Journalism and Mass Communication. The company turned around the Atlanta Braves and won a world series, and Formula One racing has become more popular under its ownership, he said.

Intellectual property and digital content ownership can present legal issues, Herndon said.

“Some of their underlying business models could be affected by what’s going to happen with digital media in the future, with how we regulate IP, compensate IP and distribute content, he said. “There’s a lot of issues there.”

O’Melveny hired Robert Wann Jr, a former Baker Botts partner who represented Liberty Media, in its Bank Practice group in March. Wann now advises Liberty in his new role at O’Melveny, according to a press release. Since March, O’Melveny has advised Liberty Media on its lead investment in a $37.7 million funding round of F1 Arcade, an F-1 racing simulator, as well as offerings of unsecured debt and convertible notes.

Baker Botts previously advised the company on large deals including its formation of a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in the hopes of finding a takeover target, which it decided to wind down in November after finding no targets for a takeover, accordingto The Hollywood Reporter.

Baker Botts reported more than $752 million in gross revenue last year and ranked among the country’s 65 largest law firms, according to data compiled by The American Lawyer. The firm’s revenue was up 4% over the year, while its headcount declined by 7%.