Brandon Gantus

Brandon M. Gantus is a partner in the employee benefits and compensation practice at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. His practice focuses on the representation of companies in their compensation and employee benefits matters, with a particular emphasis on mergers and acquisitions and capital markets transactions.

Brandon advises clients on the design, drafting, and administration of equity-based compensation programs (including stock option, restricted stock, and other equity arrangements); employment, consulting, retention, severance, change in control, and deferred compensation arrangements; and the associated tax (including Section 409A), accounting, ERISA, and securities law implications.

He also regularly assists public and private companies with corporate governance and compliance matters, including compensation disclosures for proxy filings and other applicable securities filings, as well as employee communications and public announcements.

He counsels clients on the design and administration of tax-qualified retirement plans, such as 401(k) plans and health and welfare plans, and compliance with the laws governing these plans, such as the 2010 healthcare reform laws.

Brandon has played a key role in many corporate transactions during the last several years, representing buyers and sellers in connection with employee benefits and compensation-related aspects, including pre-signing negotiations, executive and equity compensation (including Section 280G—the golden parachute rules), and post-closing employee integration issues. Significant transactions that he has advised on include: AppDynamics in its acquisition by Cisco Systems ($3.7 billion); NetSuite in its acquisition by Oracle ($9.3 billion); Rackspace in its acquisition by Apollo Global Management ($4.3 billion); Microchip in its acquisition of Atmel ($3.6 billion); Pharmacyclics in its acquisition by AbbVie ($21 billion); and regular representations of Google, salesforce.com, and GoDaddy in key acquisitions.

In addition, Brandon has significant experience with public offerings, advising more than a dozen issuers—such as Splunk, Wageworks, RingCentral, Twitter, Inogen, Vivint Solar, Apigee, GoDaddy, Sunrun, Square, Talend, and Impinj—and several underwriters in public offerings and follow-on offerings since the beginning of 2012.

EDUCATION:

• LL.M., Taxation, Georgetown University Law Center, 2008
• J.D., American University Washington College of Law, 2006
• B.A., Political Science, Boston College, 2001

ADMISSIONS:

• State Bar of California