Gordon K. Davidson Receives Business Law Section's 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award

• Publication year: 2019
• Author: By Paul J. Pascuzzi

Gordon K. Davidson Receives Business Law Section's 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award

By Paul J. Pascuzzi

Gordon K. Davidson

The Business Law Section is pleased to announce that Gordon "Gordy" K. Davidson will receive the Business Law Section's 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award. The award is given annually to a California lawyer "who over an extended period has made significant contributions to the Section or to business law generally in the State of California and who has achieved high status in the legal community." The Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to Mr. Davidson at the California Lawyers Association Annual Meeting in Monterey. The Business Law Section presents the award annually at its breakfast, which this year will be held on October 11, 2019, at 7:30 a.m.

You may have seen Gordy in the financial news lately, as he and a team from Fenwick & West just completed a $10.7 billion sale involving leading cybersecurity company Symantec Corp. Gordy has been the leader and lifeblood of Fenwick & West's Silicon Valley presence for many years; he was around when Silicon Valley was developing into the tech capital of the world. Gordy's service to the business law community makes him very deserving of this prestigious honor.

Gordy was born in Port Chester, New York, but spent most of his childhood in Arlington, Massachusetts. Gordy's parents were children of the Depression and World War II eras. His mother, Charlotte, a graduate of Barnard, worked on the technical drawings at the Manhattan Project during World War II, while his father, Kirby, a graduate of Columbia, served as an officer in the Coast Guard. Gordy and his brother and sister were products of the baby boom after World War II ended. After the war, his father started a Chevrolet dealership in Medford (a suburb of Boston), and his mother continued working as a mechanical designer while raising Gordy and his siblings. His now-deceased brother, Greg, succeeded his father in operating the dealership and his sister Gwen was the dealership's Chief Financial Officer.

So how did Gordy end up in Silicon Valley working on billion-dollar deals? After high school, tired of the New England winters, Gordy was looking for a quality engineering program at a co-ed university in a warm climate. Gordy chose Stanford, in sunny California. Gordy says he chose electrical engineering as his major because he was better at math and science than social studies. His choice also was influenced by what was going on in the science world at the time. When he was in third grade, Sputnik 1 became the first satellite launched into Earth's orbit. That had an impact on Gordy, as did the ensuing space race and the advent of the computer. The science and technology bug bit Gordy hard...