Practitioner's Spotlight: Interview With Dorian Daley
| Publication year | 2015 |
In this edition of the Practitioner's Spotlight, we are proud to feature Dorian Daley.
Dorian serves as Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary of Oracle Corporation. She began her career at Oracle in 1992 after practicing five years with the commercial litigation group of Landels, Ripley & Diamond in San Francisco.
As general counsel, Dorian is involved in a variety of international legal matters, including mergers and acquisitions, competition law matters, intellectual property litigation, and global investigations. She leads a legal team of over 350 people and is known for her hands-on style. Dorian played a lead role in the Oracle v. SAP/TomorrowNow and Oracle v. Google trials, and gave the opening and closing arguments to the European Commission regarding Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
Dorian is a 1986 graduate of the Santa Clara University School of Law and a 1981 graduate of Stanford University.
When we met up with Dorian, she was preparing for a business trip to the United Kingdom, Israel, Austria, and the Czech Republic.
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Q: Good morning Dorian. Thank you for meeting with us for The California International Law Journal's Practitioner's Spotlight....
A: I'm happy to do it.
Q: Let's start with some questions about your early career as a lawyer. First, what made you decide to become a lawyer?
A: Well, the interesting thing is that I actually made a very conscious decision not to be a lawyer. I had two brothers who had gone through law school and did not seem to enjoy the experience very much. I thought after having a really wonderful undergraduate experience, I wasn't interested in three years of not really enjoying my studies. But after college I went to work in a law firm as a paralegal, and I worked for Mary Cranston, who went on to become the chairman of what became Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. She really encouraged me to go to law school. At one point she had me working on and editing first- and second-year associate work. I worked very, very closely with her. She was really an inspiration, and brilliant, and worked incredibly hard. I became convinced that, "yes I can do this," and it would be an interesting experience because I already had my hands in some of it. And so, that's really what drove me to go.
Q: Who have been some of your mentors since becoming a lawyer?
A: Well, my brothers for sure. My brother Derek was in private practice at Brobeck, and then at Wilson Sonsini as an IP litigator. He then went on to become the general counsel for one of his clients, Octel Communications, until it was acquired ten years later by Lucent. And my brother Doug has worked in a variety of positions in government both here in the U.S. and in Micronesia. He was the attorney general of the great state of Kosrae in the Federated States of Micronesia and now is in private practice in Saipan. Both of them, in different ways, have been huge influences for me. Mary Cranston, of course, will always be one of the people that I really credit a lot for the way that I look at things, and analyze things, and try to make sure that I know more than anybody else in the room about a particular topic when we're trying to deal with something. And when I was in private practice Jack Bickel, who was the senior partner that I worked with on a number of matters, showed me a great deal about how to be graceful under fire, and be able to make the points but to do it in a gracious and a graceful way. I really respected and admired him a tremendous amount. Debbie Miller, who was another litigator at Landels, was really a terrific mentor. We worked very, very closely together, and she is now working on my team as the head of litigation. And then at Oracle, I have to say, Ray Ocampo, who was the guy that hired me. I still have a tremendous amount of respect for him. So I credit him as one of my mentors. And one of our CEOs Safra Catz, who is an attorney but is not practicing. She got her legal degree and decided to go into banking instead. Working very, very closely with her has taught me a tremendous amount. So I've been very fortunate to have quite a number of very impressive people as mentors.
Q: In your role as Oracle's general counsel, what are some of the day-to-day
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