I want to follow on Colleen's post from yesterday with my own Business Law Prof Blog Symposium commentary.  But first, I want to thank Colleen, Ben, Josh, Doug, Haskell, and Stefan for participating with me in the symposium this year.  Our continuing legal education attendees, as well as our faculty and students, love this symposium each year.  It always turns out to be a wonderful pot pourri of business law topics that literally connect the threads of what we do as business lawyers and business law educators.

Rather than being a featured presenter this year, I chose to present panel-style with two of my UT Law colleagues.  (That's us, plus our student commentator, Dixon Babb, in the photo above.  Thanks for capturing that, Haskell!)  The panel was designed to describe different conceptions of mergers based on distinct areas of legal expertise, together with related professional responsibility commentary.  I chose my colleagues Don Leatherman and Tom Plank to join me for this session–Don a tax law practitioner and teacher and Tom a property law practitioner and teacher.  The reason for these choices was simple: the three of us had covered this issue before in an informal conversation, and I had found it really stimulating.  Don and Tom are amazingly good at what they do, are humorous in their own unique ways, and were exceedingly good sports about joining me on Friday and trying to re-create the atmosphere, as well as the content, of our prior discussion.

An edited excerpt (the introduction) from the abstract for our panel is included below.  I may have more to say about this panel in a later post.  A transcript of the full panel discussion and Q&A will be published in the spring 2020 issue of Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law.  I will try to remember to post a link after that book is published.  (Last year's symposium volume can be found here, by the way.)  

Anyway, here is our introduction.  This panel discussion was so much fun to do, as you might imagine.  I can only hope others enjoyed it as much as the three of us did!

This contribution to “Connecting the Threads III,” the third annual Business Law Prof Blog symposium, involves a conversation between and among three law professors with diverse law practice backgrounds—a corporate finance lawyer, a tax lawyer, and a property lawyer who has served as bankruptcy counsel and Uniform Commercial Code sales and securitization counsel. About ten years ago, these three lawyers, all professors at The University of Tennessee College of Law, found themselves by a water cooler talking about mergers, equity sales, and assets sales. As the corporate finance lawyer recalls, the conversation moved into high gear when the property lawyer questioned her classroom depiction of merger transactions as creatures of statutory magic . . . .

In their conversation that day, the three law professors began to scope out various conceptions of mergers and acquisitions (in common parlance, M&A transactions or business combinations) based on the distinct perspectives provided by their professional backgrounds, their scholarship, and the courses they teach that intersect with M&A transactions. The conversation emanates from the distinct policy objectives (and resulting broad, conceptual substantive focuses) of different legal regimes. The observations each made—both as to their own areas of expertise and those of their colleagues—together offered an appropriately complex picture of these intricate transactions, which often are executed using a team of lawyers representing various areas of practice. As the colleagues parted company that day, one of them made mental note that the conversation should have been recorded—for her own benefit and for the benefit of students who, depending on their upper-division course selections, may not get exposure to this more complete and rich portrayal of business combinations.

At “Connecting the Threads III,” these three law professors . . . attempt to recreate and expand on the content of their impromptu water-cooler conversation. While the precise discussion cannot, after all of these years, be faithfully replicated, its overall nature—updated to reflect current legal doctrine, policy, theory, and norms—can be reconstructed. The discussion addresses a series of broad questions, the threshold one being what a merger is, from the standpoint of each professor’s area of practice, scholarship, and teaching.