Southwest Georgia Ethanol LLC, which built a 100-million-gallon-a-year ethanol plant in Mitchell County, has filed for Chapter 11 reorganization with the help of its lawyers at McKenna Long & Aldridge.

The company listed debt of $134.1 million and assets of $164.7 million in its petition, filed Feb. 1 by McKenna lawyers J. Michael Levengood, Gary W. Marsh and Bryan Bates. Read more »

Delta Air Lines took out the equivalent of a second mortgage on more than 50 of its airplanes, when, with the help of its lawyers at Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton, the company launched two public offerings Monday totaling $235 million.

The offerings are structured as enhanced equipment trust certificates, or EETCs, a specialized form of financing larger airlines use to fund the purchase of their jets. The EETCs use as collateral the same airplanes that Delta used in July and November 2010, when it issued $450 million and $474 million in debt, respectively. The new debt ranks junior to the prior tranches in collectability. Read more »

A team of lawyers from King & Spalding advised Norcross-based RockTenn Co. in its $3.5 billion acquisition of Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. Both companies are in the paperboard packaging business.

Though the deal was led by New York-based corporate partner E. William Bates II, it was well stocked with Atlantans, including corporate partners Anne M. Cox, Keith M. Townsend and four associates; tax partner Peter J. Genz; employee benefits partner Eleanor Banister; environmental partners Les A. Oakes and Harold M. Shaw III and three other local lawyers; finance partner Albert H. Conrad; financial restructuring partner Paul K. Ferdinands and two associates. Read more »

Paul Hastings lawyers are helping ExamWorks Group, Inc. with some post-holiday shopping. The independent provider of medical examinations agreed to pay $210 million for MES Group, Inc., another provider in the same space.

Led by corporate partner Reinaldo Pascual, a team including Philip Marzetti, Eric Keller, James Holden, Dianne Nesson and Andrea Gehman put together the deal, which consists of $175 million in cash, more than 1.4 million shares of ExamWorks stock with a contractual value of $25 million and up to $10 million of assumed debt. Read more »

Jones Day, DLA Piper and Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker made the top 10 in a ranking of legal advisers handling the most mid-market deals done with U.S.-based target companies in 2010.

Those same three firms, plus Bryan Cave, made the top 10 in a separate ranking of firms handling the most small-market deals with U.S.-based target companies last year. Read more »

King & Spalding rung in the new year with a $169.6 million deal helping Total System Services, a credit-card processor based in Columbus, Ga., buy the remaining 49 percent of First National Bank of Omaha’s merchant acquiring business.

The first half of the deal, which King & Spalding also handled, closed in April and involved a $150.5 million joint venture in which TSYS bought 51 percent of the merchant acquiring business, which provides merchants with point-of-sale equipment and processes their transactions. Read more »

Jones Day client Pinova Holdings Inc. has acquired a company that uses terpenes—products derived from pine trees and other natural resources—to create flavors and fragrances used in oral-care products, candy and beverages.

The target, LyondellBasell Flavors & Fragrances, has manufacturing facilities in Brunswick, Ga., and Jacksonville, Fla. Its seller, Netherlands-based LyondellBasell Industries NV, said the transaction results in after-tax proceeds of about $150 million. Read more »

With the help of its lawyers at King & Spalding, private equity firm Roark Capital Group has purchased Atkins Nutritionals, the company that gave you the Atkins diet.

Lawyers from three King & Spalding offices represented Roark in the deal. The local legal team included Atlantans Raymond E. Baltz, William G. Roche, Jaron R. Brown, L. Wayne Pressgrove, Donald S. Kohla and W. Scott Petty, among others. Read more »

A team of lawyers from Nelson Mullins has helped ink a high-flying deal: The union of SITA and Com-Net Software, providers of flight display and paging technology for airports and mass-transit systems.

Nelson Mullins’ partner Mike Rubinger and associate Sarah Loya represented SITA, a Geneva, Switzerland-based air transport IT specialist, in its acquisition of Com-Net Software, a Miamisburg, Ohio-based company. Com-Net has been rolled into SITA’s airport solutions division, which now claims 50 percent of North American market share and 59 customer airports, including Denver International, Los Angeles International, Reagan Washington National and LaGuardia International. Read more »

Pax Industries, a Norcross-based logistics company focusing on packaging, warehousing and other services for the plastics industry, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Georgia. The 17-year-old company’s petition reports $50,000 or less in assets, and liabilities between $1 million and $10 million. Unsecured creditors include AMC Trucking, owed more than $112,000, and Georgia-Pacific Corp., owed more than $60,000. Edward F. Danowitz of Danowitz & Associates is debtor’s counsel.