Weil draws upon the full range of legal disciplines at the firm to help clients understand evolving regulations and legal trends impacting their businesses across multiple jurisdictions. As governments impose unique requirements on aerospace companies, particularly on government contractors, our aerospace clients increasingly call on us to provide advice in connection with mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, and divestitures, as well as a host of antitrust/competition, corporate, white collar investigatory, FCPA, and corporate governance issues. Our attorneys are deeply conversant with the issues that arise frequently in the aerospace industry and are called upon by those within the industry as well as investors and lenders with interests in the industry.

Since its inception, our aerospace practice has included litigation and arbitration components that feature unmatched experience evaluating and litigating antitrust cases in the defense and aerospace industry; several antitrust partners are high-level government officials who were responsible for the U.S. government’s antitrust enforcement program in the defense industry. Moreover, our attorneys have prepared claims and litigated disputes involving major commercial airplane development programs, foreign and domestic joint venture agreements, monopolization claims under the antitrust laws, product liability, and a host of other issues. We have also handled disputes arising out of government subcontracting relationships.

Since the early 1980s, when many of our clients were scrutinized by the Department of Defense’s campaign against “fraud, waste and abuse,” we have represented a large part of the aerospace industry in government investigations. Our representation of clients includes investigations on a broad range of critical issues, including potential environmental violations, payments to foreign agents, export control, FAA certification, and others.

Within the past decade, we have participated in numerous deals and cases that have define the industry, including:

• General Electric Aviation Systems’s sale of its flight control actuation product line by way of asset transfer to Moog Wolverhampton, a subsidiary of precision motion control products and systems manufacturer Moog, Inc.;
• Berkshire Partners LLC and Greenbriar Equity Group LLC in connection with their acquisition of AmSafe Partners Inc., a provider of safety-restraint and cargo-securing systems for the aviation, military and specialty vehicle markets;
• Garmin’s patents litigation involving global positioning system receivers. Weil promptly identified prior art, invalidating all of the asserted patents, resulting in a prompt successful mediated settlement;
• Highly favorable settlement for Hughes Electronics in a purchase-price adjustment arbitration against Boeing resulting from the sale of Hughes’ satellite business to Boeing. Boeing sought adjustments of over $650 million dollars in the arbitration, which was conducted by KPMG LLP.