Daniel Lac

Daniel serves as a strategic and trusted legal adviser to company founders, executives, management and human resources business partners on a wide range of labor and employment issues at the federal, state and local levels. He provides pragmatic and business-minded solutions to manage litigation risk, including by anticipating and identifying compliance gaps, offering guidance on reduction-in-force planning, advising on employee communications, conducting audits and workplace trainings, directing internal and external investigations, and creating policies and standard operating procedures (SOPs).

Daniel regularly represents employers, directors, officers and executives in the drafting, reviewing and negotiation of agreements relating to executive employment, director and advisory boards, arbitration, severance, settlement, confidentiality/proprietary information and invention assignment, equity, retention, commissions, bonuses, change of control transactions, noncompetition, staffing agencies and professional employer organizations (PEOs), consulting, and service providers.

In addition, Daniel partners with the Cooley’s mergers & acquisitions, emerging companies, and venture capital teams – and the firm’s domestic and global clients – on labor and employment transactional matters, including buy- and sell-side M&A, divestitures, spinoffs, asset purchases, VC financings and initial public offerings (IPOs). He’s also well-versed in the life sciences, pharmaceuticals, technology, media, sports, video game, entertainment, fintech, real estate, construction, consumer goods, food service and retail industries.

Daniel has significant experience investigating and leading employment litigation and agency enforcement matters – including prosecutions of labor contractors for unpaid wages and defending employers in wage-and-hour class, representative and agency actions, single-plaintiff actions involving wrongful termination, whistleblower retaliation, harassment, discrimination, and trade secrets and unfair competition actions. In addition, Daniel has broad understanding of labor and union matters, having participated in successful representative elections and hearings before the National Labor Relations Board.

Some of Daniel’s recent representative matters include advising:

• Horizon Therapeutics, a specialty biopharmaceutical company, in its:
• Approximately $28.3 billion sale to Amgen, which was the largest healthcare deal of 2022 and the third-largest all-cash healthcare deal in history at the time
• $3.1 billion acquisition of Viela Bio
• Gracell Biotechnologies, a global clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to developing innovative cell therapies for the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases, on its definitive agreement to be acquired by AstraZeneca
• RayzeBio, a targeted radiopharmaceutical company developing an innovative pipeline against solid tumor targets, on its upsized $357.6 million initial public offering and subsequent $4.1 billion agreement to sell to Bristol Myers Squibb
• Morphimmune, a private biotechnology company, in its definitive merger agreement with Immunome and $125 million private investment
• Apollo Endosurgery, a medical device company, on its agreement to be acquired by Boston Scientific in an all-cash transaction with an enterprise value of approximately $615 million
• Delphix, a vendor of test data management software, on its acquisition by Perforce Software
• Renesas Electronics, a multinational premier automotive semiconductor company and the largest microcontroller supplier in the world, on employment and transactional-related matters
• Rubicon Technology Partners, a private equity firm, on its strategic investment in Tacton, a top software as a service (SaaS) company
• Midwestern Electric, a portfolio company of Canada-based private equity firm CAI Capital Partners and a provider of electrical infrastructure services, on its acquisition of Kuharchik Construction and Wyoming Electric & Signals
• Bridge to Life, an organ preservation and perfusion technologies supplier, in its sale of certain assets – including its EVOSS heart and lung and LifeCradle heart perfusion assets – to TransMedics

Prior to joining Cooley, Daniel was an associate attorney at the global law firm of DLA Piper. Before attending law school at the University of California, Berkeley, he served as a labor compliance officer for the second-largest public school system in the United States, where he investigated and prosecuted wage claims.