Ronald L. Olson

LOS ANGELES - Ronald L. Olson practices on a grand scale. He represents major corporations in significant litigation and in large transactions.

A few years ago, he guided Google founder Larry Page in selling part of Page's flying-car company, Kittyhawk, to Boeing. Last year, he advised Bill Gates on financial matters during the Microsoft founder's divorce. And more recently, he helped ready the Denver Broncos to be sold for the highest price ever paid for a U.S. professional sports franchise, $4.65 billion.

This year, he said, "there were a couple of things that were pretty unique."

On the litigation side of his practice, he represented McDonald's in suing its former CEO Stephen Easterbrook to return the multimillion-dollar golden parachute it paid him when it fired him for having an inappropriate relationship with an employee of a vendor.

Then, a few weeks later, the company learned Easterbrook had had an intimate relationship with an employee. Olson led an investigation that uncovered that the CEO had affairs with three employees "and was carrying on very obnoxiously," Olson said. His lies and cover-up led to the lawsuit. McDonald's Corp. v. Easterbrook, 2020-0658 (Del. Chancery Ct., filed Aug. 10, 2020).

The case settled late last year, with the deposed CEO returning about $105 million in cash and stock.

To Olson, what makes the matter unusual isn't that a company sued its CEO. Rather, it was that McDonald's took action despite knowing it would be criticized for paying Easterbrook initially. "It stood up and took the heat," Olson said. "I can't think of any other company that has done anything quite comparable to that."

The second unique matter Olson worked on this year was advising Berkshire Hathaway on its acquisition of insurer Alleghany Corp. for $11.6 billion. "From the beginning to the end of that deal, it took a total of two weeks," he said. "We're very proud of that."

Even more unusual was that his client insisted that its acquisition price be discounted by whatever amount Alleghany paid its investment banker, probably the only time that's happened in a corporate acquisition. Typically, the investment banker's fee comes out of the buyer's pocket, he said. "We thought that that was a serious misalignment of incentives and disincentives."