Awards
The Business Journal honored four attorneys and one legal team at its annual General Counsel Awards dinner on Nov. 13 at Hotel Irvine. Troy McHenry, executive vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary of HCP Inc., won the Public Company award; Paul Bokota, division vice president and general counsel at Spectrum Brands Inc., the Private Company award; Stacey Jue, assistant general counsel of ABM Industries Inc., the Specialty Counsel award; Bruce Larson, vice president and assistant general counsel at Advantage Solutions, the Rising Star award; and Edwards Lifesciences Corp.’s in-house legal team the honor in that category. The winners will be featured in our next edition.
— Mark Mueller
Hospitality
Harbor Hotels LLC, an Arizona family investment group affiliated with Cornerstone Hotel Group LLC in Buena Park, bought the Courtyard by Marriott near Long Beach Airport and the Long Beach Exchange shopping and entertainment center. Records show a price of about $47 million, which works out to $295,000 a room for the 159-key property.
— Paul Hughes
Pendry Hotels plans to build a ski resort in the Canyons Village area of Park City, Utah, about five miles from Montage Deer Valley, a resort run by Pendry sister company Montage Hotels & Resorts. Both hotel and resort operators are units of Montage International in Irvine. Montage has nearly a dozen resorts in development or operating, typically aimed at the senior executive set and up. A room at its Laguna Beach resort can easily cost $1,000 a night. Pendry is the parent company’s lifestyle hotelier.
— Paul Hughes
Philanthropy
The Association of Fundraising Professionals’ OC chapter honored local givers at the annual National Philanthropy Day luncheon, which was attended by 700 people at City National Grove in Anaheim. The honorees are: Lauren Best, outstanding youth; Orange County Bar Association’s Charitable Fund, philanthropic group; Joe Hanauer, volunteer fundraiser; Shulman, Hodges & Bastian LLP, small business; Service Champions Heating & Air Conditioning, midsize business; Bank of America, large business; Michelle Wulfesteig, founder award; Charlie and Ling Zhang, philanthropists.
— Pete Weitzner
Technology
Irvine-based Kofax Inc. is paying $400 million in cash to buy the document-imaging division of Nuance Communications Inc. Kofax, which had $363 million in sales last year, said the purchase bolsters its presence in intelligent-automation technologies. Nuance’s document imaging division reported $217.7 million in fiscal 2017 revenue. Nuance, a Burlington, Mass.-based company best known for its Dragon speech-recognition technology, said the sale enables it to focus on its conversational artificial intelligence- and cloud-based solutions while improving its growth profile.
— Peter J. Brennan
