Profile: William M Kelly

Mergers and Acquisitions

Biography: Mergers and Acquisitions

Mr Kelly is a member of Davis Polk & Wardwell's corporate department and a founder of the firm's Menlo Park office. He represents technology companies and their investors and advisers in mergers and acquisitions, strategic alliances and capital formation transactions, as well as in matters of corporate governance and securities law compliance.

Mr Kelly has represented Oracle in its successful unsolicited offer for PeopleSoft, its acquisitions of Hyperion, Siebel Systems, Stellent, MetaSolv and Retek, and its investment in i-Flex Solutions; KLA-Tencor in its acquisitions of ADE and ThermaWave; Affymetrix in its acquisition of Parallele; Yahoo! in its acquisition of Inktomi and several private companies; NetIQ in several acquisitions and in its sale to Attachmate WRQ; and Francisco Partners and its portfolio companies in leveraged acquisitions of technology companies and in its recently announced flash memory joint venture with Intel and STMicro. He has represented Comcast in strategic intellectual property arrangements with Microsoft, TV Guide and TiVo. He also advises companies like Affymetrix, FormFactor, KB Home, KLA-Tencor, Oracle, Palm and Photon Dynamics in a variety of corporate and governance matters.

Mr Kelly joined Davis Polk in 2000 after six years at Silicon Graphics, where he held positions including general counsel, acting chief financial officer and senior vice president for all administrative and corporate development functions. He also had responsibility for SGI's software businesses, for the execution of several large acquisition transactions and for the formation and successful spin-off of MIPS Technologies in 1998. He remains a director and chair of the audit committee at MIPS Technologies. From 1978 until 1994, he practised law at Shearman & Sterling, most recently as co-managing partner of its San Francisco office.

Mr Kelly graduated from Columbia College in 1975 and in 1978 received his JD from Columbia Law School, where he was on the board of editors of the Columbia Law Review and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. He is admitted to the bars of California and New York.