Sarah K. Solum

About Sarah K. Solum

Sarah has extensive experience in capital markets transactions, including IPOs, investment grade and high yield debt offerings, convertible notes transactions and preferred stock offerings. She also regularly represents companies on mergers and acquisitions and advises on SEC compliance, disclosure and corporate governance matters. 

Sarah was recently on the Global Advisory Board of the Women in Law Empowerment Forum (WILEF) and a Co-Chair of the Northern California chapter. She was also a member of HiPower, an executive leadership program for women. 

Sarah is a member of the Board of Visitors at Duke University School of Law. She is also on the Board of Trustees at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Day School. Prior to joining Freshfields, Sarah was a partner at Davis Polk.

Recent work

Sarah advises issuers and underwriters in IPOs and a variety of other equity and debt capital markets transactions, including:

• IPOs: AMIS Holdings, AppNet, Apropos, CAI International, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Coupa Software, DocuSign, Etsy, Fastly, Fortinet, Forty Seven, GoDaddy, Handspring, Homegrocer, iBeam, Kaiser Aluminum, NGM Biopharmaceuticals, Pivotal Software, Razorfish, Responsys, Samsara, SendGrid, ServiceSource International, Silver Spring Networks, Splunk, SunRun, Viant Technology and Zymergen.
• Follow-on and other stock offerings: Atara, Catapult Communications, Chegg, Corcept Therapeutics, Coupa Software, DocuSign, E*TRADE, Endocyte, EVgo, Fastly, GoDaddy, Mannkind, Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Palm, Splunk, SVB Financial, Wet Seal and WinStar.
• Convertible notes offerings: ADC Telecommunications, Affymetrix, Cadence, Chegg, Coupa Software, Cypress Semiconductor, DocuSign, E-house, Equinix, Fastly, Horizon Pharmaceuticals, Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, Pandora Media, Splunk, Wix.com and Zynga.
• Investment-grade and high-yield note offerings: AMIS Holdings, Budget Group, El Paso Electric, E*TRADE, Kansas City Power & Light, Oracle, Raytheon, Seagate, SVB Financial and TriNet.

Sarah’s experience in mergers and acquisitions and other significant transactions includes advising:

• Committee of independent directors of the board of Qualtrics on the $12.5bn all-cash sale of the company to a private equity consortium (the largest private equity transaction of the year).
• Capella Space on its $60 million growth equity financing.
• Coupa on its $8 billion sale to Thoma Bravo.
• TRM Labs on its announced $70 million expansion of its Series B financing led by Thoma Bravo.
• Zymergen on its $300 million sale to Ginkgo Bioworks—the first-ever sale of a publicly-listed public benefit corporation.
• TriNet on its $109 million modified Dutch auction tender offer in 2022 and on its $316 million modified Dutch auction tender offer in 2021, on its strategic investment from Atairos Group and on its fixed price tender offer, share repurchase and related financing transactions. 
• Capella Space on its $97 million Series C debt and equity financing led by NightDragon, with significant participation from existing investors DCVC and Cota Capital.
• Pivotal Software on its sale to VMware.
• A founder/CEO of a major Internet company on the adoption of a dual class stock structure and related recapitalization.
• Affymetrix on its sale to Thermo Fisher Scientific.
• FormFactor on its acquisition of Cascade Microtech.
• 1-Page on its acquisition of Marianas Labs.
• Getty Investments on the take-private of Getty Images by Hellman & Friedman and subsequent acquisition by Carlyle.
• Sterling Financial on its recapitalization by Warburg Pincus and Thomas H. Lee Partners.
• Palm on the private placement of units of preferred stock and warrants to Elevation Partners.
• E*TRADE on its recapitalization by Citadel Investment Funds and subsequent equity sale/debt exchange.
• Affymetrix on its acquisitions of eBioscience, USB Corporation, True Materials and Panomics.
• Blue Coat Systems on its acquisition of Packeteer and its private placement of convertible notes and warrants.
• Oracle on its acquisitions of Siebel Systems and PeopleSoft.
• NetIQ on its sale to AttachmateWRQ.
• XcelleNet on its sale to Sybase.