Craig Menden is a partner in the Corporate & Financial Services Department, where he concentrates on complex M&A transactions involving technology and life sciences companies. His nearly 25 years of transactional experience includes more than 1,000 completed mergers and acquisitions with values ranging from tens of millions to nearly twenty billion dollars.
Craig’s representation ranges from young startups to mature tech companies. He has extensive experience with a broad range of deal structures, especially public company acquisitions and VC-backed private acquisitions. He also regularly represents parties in strategic investments. As a result of his experience and respect within the M&A legal community, he currently chairs the M&A Market Trends Committee of the American Bar Association.
Experience
Prior to joining Willkie in 2019, Craig was a partner at Cooley LLP.
- Super Lawyers, Northern California Super Lawyer, 2016-2018
- Who's Who Legal: Mergers & Acquisitions, 2018
- Legal 500 U.S., in the Mergers, Acquisitions and Buyouts – M&A: Large Deals ($1bn-5bn) , 2018
Craig is an active member of the American Bar Association's M&A Committee and is currently Chair of the Market Trends Subcommittee that oversees publication of the Market Trends Surveys. He also serves as Vice Chair of the Committee’s working group that published the Private Target Mergers & Acquisitions Deal Points Study.
Craig previously served on the Board of Trustees for the Charles Armstrong School, a private school for dyslexic learners.
Craig speaks regularly on mergers & acquisitions related topics at various events and symposia, including three times annually conducting the American Bar Association's M&A Market Trends Subcommittee meetings.
Craig has acted as lead counsel in the following notable transactions*:
- Cisco Systems acquisition of ThousandEyes, Inc.
- Loyale Healthcare sale to RevSpring
- Cisco Systems acquisition of Voicea
- Cisco Systems acquisition of Luxtera for $660 million
- Cisco Systems acquisition of OpenDNS for $635 million
- Elemental Technologies sale to Amazon.com
- Rovi Corporation acquisition of TiVo for $1.1 billion
- Sale of SteelBrick to Salesforce for $360 million
- Periscope sale to Twitter
- Merger of Objet and Stratasys, resulting in a $1.4 billion combined company, and the acquisition of Makerbot for up to $600 million in Stratasys stock
- Sale of Volterra Semiconductor to Maxim Integrated Products for $605 million in a tender offer pursuant to the new §251(h) of the DGCL (the first transaction structured from inception under new §251(h))
- Sale of SpookyCool Labs to Zynga
- Acquisitions for Cadence Design Systems, including the acquisition of Sigrity for $80 million
- Sale of Postini to Google for approximately $640 million
- Millennial Media in its acquisition of Jumptap for approximately $250 million in stock, and its acquisition of Metaresolver in an all cash acquisition
- Several acquisitions for Intuit, including the acquisition of Digital Insight Corporation for approximately $1.2 billion, the divestiture of Blue Ocean Software, and recently the acquisitions of Applatix, Payvment and Itrios
- 15 additional acquisitions for Cisco Systems
- Sale of Funzio to Gree International for $210 million
- Sale of AlphaCore Pharma to AstraZeneca for up to $190 million
* Craig advised on some of these matters prior to joining Willkie.
Credentials
Education
University of Utah, J.D., 1995 Brigham Young University, B.S., 1992