Marshall Sonenshine
Managing Partner, Sonenshine Partners

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 Co-Head of M&A. Prior to joining Wolfensohn, Mr. Sonenshine was with Salomon Brothers in New York. In 2009, he was named Adjunct Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia University Business School. In 2015 he became lecturer on Law at M&A at Harvard Law School. He is 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 School & 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 an 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.

Mr. Sonenshine counsels numerous leading companies and has advised on numerous leading 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 AEG, the global industrial group within Daimler Benz, the Sony/Columbia Pictures/Guber Peters Entertainment merger, the sale of the Structural Dynamics to EDS, the hostile defense of The United States Shoe Corporation, the mergers of Chancellor Media, Capstar and Clear Channel, the sale of ABAQUS to Dassault Systèmes, the recapitalization of KKR-and-Wachovia backed New South Communications (later Nuvox), the representation of Alcoa in several global divestitures, the restructuring and sale of Riverstone Networks to Alcatel, the restructuring and sale of the Philadelphia Newspapers, and many others.

Mr Sonenshine is Trustee and Chairman of Endowment for Hunter College (CUNY) and Trustee and former Co-Chair of the Center for Law Brain and Behavior at Harvard and Mass General. He is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and a member of the Corporate Boards of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has served as Trustee and Co Chairman of Development for Jazz at Lincoln Center and the International Center of Photography, Chairman of the Harvard Law School Fund, Member of the Brown Annual Fund Executive Committee, Vice Chairman of the Board of ArtsConnection and Member of the Democratic National Committee New York Tri State Finance Committee.