Business Journal makes its case for L.A.’s top lawyers who shepherd the biggest M&A deals.
KEN BARONSKY, 48
FIRM: Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy
LAW SCHOOL: University of Washington
CLIENTS: Station Casinos, Fertitta Entertainment, Fiesta Palms, Golden Gaming, Gordon Biersch, Zuffa (Ultimate Fighting Championships)
Ken Baronsky was just out of law school when he was assigned a leveraged buyout case that made him wonder whether he had chosen the wrong profession.
“I was given extraordinary responsibility under extreme time pressure on a complex transaction,” he said. “I worked 72 hours straight at one stretch and fell asleep in a New York cab with the meter running. A paralegal on the case had a nervous breakdown.”
That was 1989. Since then, he’s established a practice focusing on the U.S. gaming industry, starting with Mississippi riverboats and Native American casinos, while continuing to work on mergers and acquisitions.
As part of his work in restructuring one of Nevada’s largest casino and resort operators, the Fertitta family’s Station Casinos, he represented the owners in their $2 billion acquisition of four casinos in Las Vegas: Red Rock Resort, Boulder Station, Sunset Station and Palace Station.
The purchase was part of the largest bankruptcy case in the history of the U.S. gaming industry. The case ended in June with a $7 billion restructuring that preserved the firm’s 18 casinos and hotels, along with nearly 13,000 Las Vegas jobs.
The restructuring erased $4 billion in debt. Brothers Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta are longtime Baronsky clients. He represented the company in its initial public offering in 1993 and then guided a $9 billion leveraged buyout of the firm in 2007.
Baronsky began specializing in gaming in the early 1990s, when legalized gambling first moved beyond Nevada and New Jersey onto riverboat casinos in Missouri, Mississippi and Louisiana.
It wasn’t always comfortable work. Sweltering on the tarmac in Biloxi, Miss., while waiting for his plane to take off was an unfortunate common occurrence during those years, Baronsky recalled.
But it wasn’t always uncomfortable, either. He believes the industry’s reputation for unsavory characters is not deserved.
“I find it to be one of the cleaner businesses,” he said. “It’s very transparent because it’s highly regulated and the people who have gaming licenses are very protective of them.”
Baronsky, who lives in Manhattan Beach with his wife and two daughters, was raised in Seattle by an attorney father and a mother who dreamed he would one day become an orthodontist.
“That sounded pretty awful to me,” he said.
These days he enjoys spending time with his family and skiing, golfing, travel and wine-tasting.
