Bio

Marshall Sonenshine is Chairman and Managing Partner of New York investment banking firm Sonenshine Partners. Mr. Sonenshine was previously Partner in Wolfensohn & Company, the M&A boutique headed by former Salomon Brothers’ head of banking Jim Wolfensohn and US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. Mr. Sonenshine was part of the leadership team that merged Wolfensohn first into Bankers Trust, where he headed Media M & A and Aerospace/Transportation M & A, and later into Deutsche Bank, where Mr. Sonenshine was asked to serve as Global Co-Head of M & A. Mr. Sonenshine began his finance career at Salomon Brothers in New York. Since 2016, Mr Sonenshine has served on the adjunct faculty at Harvard Law School teaching Mergers and Advanced Corporate Transactions. From 2009-15 Mr Sonenshine was Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia University Business School teaching Private Equity and Turnaround Management. Mr Sonenshine has been a global finance commentator on CNBC and Bloomberg and has published widely in the New York Times, Financial Times, Institutional Investor, Merrill Datasite, Harvard Law and Business Schools and Columbia Business School. Mr. Sonenshine holds a BA, magna cum laude, from Brown University and a JD from Harvard Law School, where he served as Editor of the Harvard Law Review. He studied at L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris and, while at law school, he served as a Teaching Fellow in International Relations at Harvard University’s Government Department, and an Instructor in Legal Methods and in the International Tax Program at the Law School. Following Harvard he became law clerk to Hon. Lawrence Pierce of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, where he worked on major corporate, securities and M&A federal cases. Mr. Sonenshine counsels numerous leading companies globally including in the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, China, Japan and Australia, and has advised on numerous major transactions worldwide, including the Disney/ABC merger, the merger of International Lease Finance Corporation into America International Group, the global restructuring of GPA Group plc with General Electric, the restructuring of Daimler Benz’s AEG industrial group, the Sony/Columbia Pictures and Guber Peters Entertainment merger, the sale of GE affiliated Genesis Lease to AerCap, the sale of Structural Dynamics to EDS and Simulia to Dassault Systemes, the proxy battle and hostile defense of The United States Shoe Corporation, the mergers of Chancellor Media, Capstar and Clear Channel, the sale of Simulia to Dassault Systèmes, the recapitalization of KKR-and-Wachovia backed New South Communications (later Nuvox), the representation of Alcoa in several global divestitures, the restructurings and sales in Chapter 11 of Riverstone Networks to Alcatel, of Hear USA to Siemens, and of the Philadelphia Inquirer and News to an Investor Group. In Asia Mr Sonenshine and Sonenshine Partners has represented numerous companies including two of China’s leading publicly traded manufacturers (Nine Dragons and Sirio Pharma) in their first North American acquisitions. Earlier, Mr Sonenshine was Senior Investment Banker in Fuji Wolfensohn, representing major Japanese companies in cross border Mergers. Mr Sonenshine is Trustee of Hunter College where he has served on the Executive Committee as Chairman of Endowment. He has also served as Chairman of the Harvard Law School Fund and as Co-Chair of the Center for Law Brain and Behavior at Harvard and Mass General. He has also served as Trustee, Executive Committee Member and Chairman of Development for Jazz at Lincoln Center and the International Center of Photography, as Member of the Brown University Annual Fund Executive Committee, and as Vice Chairman of ArtsConnection. He is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and has served as member of the Corporate Boards of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and as Member of the Democratic National Committee New York Tri State Finance Committee. Mr Sonenshine has also served as Chairman of RosettaBooks and as Executive Producer to three leading political and legal documentary films on HBO, including Loving Story, for which he holds Emmy and Peabody awards.