Gibbons Helps Hoffmann-La Roche Close the Sale of its Former North American Headquarters

News

October 19, 2016

Gibbons P.C. announces that it acted as legal advisor to Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. in the sale of its 116-acre former North American Pharmaceuticals headquarters campus, which spans the municipalities of Nutley and Clifton, New Jersey, to an affiliate of Prism Capital Partners. As part of the transaction, a joint venture between Hackensack University Medical Center and Seton Hall University will lease two of the campus buildings and 16 acres of the property from Prism for the new Seton Hall–Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, the first new private medical school in New Jersey in over 40 years.

With the completion of the sale, Seton Hall and Hackensack Meridian are now free to renovate the leased buildings with the necessary improvements to support a new medical and allied professionals school, along with a research facility. The new site will house Seton Hall’s College of Nursing and its School of Health and Medical Sciences, along with a National Health Institute-designated Clinical Research Center that Hackensack Meridian plans to develop.

A team from Gibbons P.C. led by Russell Bershad and Douglas Janacek, Co-Chairs of the firm’s Real Property & Environmental Department, represented Roche as lead real estate and development counsel in this matter, with Paul Hastings LLP, led by Deborah Schmall, serving as lead environmental counsel.

The New Jersey campus had served as Roche’s North American headquarters from 1929 until 2009, the year Roche acquired biotechnology company Genentech. Since then, Roche has been gradually moving its North American operations to the San Francisco area, where Genentech is located. The sale of the company’s New Jersey campus and the creation of the new medical school, among the largest and most complex recent transactions of this kind in the metropolitan region, is anticipated to give rise to a new commercial center and additional jobs for the area, as purchaser Prism Capital completes plans for the remainder of the site and leasing to additional tenants.