Clock Running for Sun Lawyers

Sun GC Mike Dillon

Law department layoffs in the wake of a merger aren’t uncommon, so Sun’s lawyers shouldn’t be too surprised when Oracle starts swinging the axe, according to The Recorder.

While they’re all hard at work trying to close the $7.4 billion software deal, they Sun lawyers should also be polishing their resumes. Oracle has a reputation for aggressively cutting loose software lawyers and dispersing the work through its own law department. Just ask former PeopleSoft counsel, of the 50 on staff prior to their company’s acquisition by Oracle, almost all were let go.

More after the jump, including some insight into the reality of dealing with Oracle lawyers.

BEA staff went through a similar process after being acquired for $8.5 billion last year.

Of the 20 or so lawyers and eight legal staffers that worked in the BEA legal department, only two staffers and one lawyer based in Sweden have jobs at Oracle now, former BEA lawyers said. Most were laid off, including Silicon Valley veteran and BEA general counsel Robert Donohue, they said. Donohue declined to comment, saying only that he is now working part-time somewhere.

The severance wasn’t bad, though:

one year for vice-presidents and above and six months for more junior lawyers. But that was because of a change-of-control clause written in by BEA, not Oracle’s generosity.

For those who have dealt with the product side of the Oracle law department, it’s hard to believe there’s a coherent plan in place to bring the department into a centralized structure. Oracle has been highly acquisitive over the years and hasn’t done a very good job at all of integrating the offerings. Legacy products, especially the big ones from PeopleSoft and Siebel, are still completely silo-ed – customers get different, often conflicting, contract and pricing terms depending on where the product or the lawyer comes from. The products aren’t even sold as a coherent solution, which makes sense, because customers have to deal with three or four sales teams (although large customers are technically assigned a liaison-type person), and everything has to “go to Safra [Catz, the recently promoted president]’s office” for an exception. Their M&A team is top notch, though.

Sun GC Mike Dillon is a sporadic blogger, but no updates yet on how this will shake out for him. According to his bio,

Mike has worked at Sun Microsystems twice during his 20 year career. From 1993 to 1999, he served in a variety of roles in Sun’s legal department including in support of Sun Microelectronics, Sun Soft, Inc., and I-Planet. In 2002, Mike rejoined Sun as Vice President of the Products Law Group. In this role, he was responsible for legal support for all of Sun’s product development efforts. In April, 2004 he was appointed to his current role as Sun’s General Counsel.

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