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While the world waited for AOL and Netscape to announce their marriage last month, Laguna Beach lawyer Allen Grogan was holed up at the San Francisco office of Goldman Sachs trying to help AOL nail down a key piece of the deal.
Grogan, the lead attorney for AOL in its negotiation with Sun Microsystems, was in charge of crafting the plans for the merged AOL-Netscape to work with Sun to bring the company's services to new markets.
"It was always clear there would be no AOL-Netscape deal unless these agreements with Sun occurred," said Grogan, 45, a partner at Blanc Williams Johnson and Kronstadt. For three weeks, lawyers for Sun and AOL hammered out the details. There were tense moments, sleepless nights and a lot of takeout food.
At any given time, Grogan and three other attorneys from his firm were working on...