The Lucky Litigator

The Lucky Litigator
Reginald Davis boldly goes where very few litigators have gone before: to a dot-com

By Renee Deger

R eginald Davis is one lucky litigator.
Despite having very little Internet legal experience, Davis was hired by Yahoo Inc. as the venerable technology company's first in-house litigator.
Like kids outside a candy store, Silicon Valley litigators have looked on in awe as scores of their corporate colleagues have traded predictable law firm salaries for the riskier -- but potentially more lucrative -- stock options offered by technology companies.
While scads of tech companies have hired lawyers, a great many other start-ups are not far enough along to require full-time corporate help, and even fewer need litigators on staff. For Yahoo, the hiring in January of Davis reflects the company's maturity. For Davis, a seasoned law firm insurance litigator, it was a once-in-a-lifetime shot.
"We're very open-minded about hiring people for jobs where they may not appear to have directly the right experience," says Jon Sobel, Yahoo's associate general counsel, to whom Davis reports. "Reggie impressed us as being particularly practical and thoughtful, and people here thought he would be able to solve a lot of challenging problems."
San Francisco legal recruiter Avis Caravello says it is difficult for litigators to get in-house jobs, making Davis "one of the very lucky few."
She explains that while many litigators clamor for in-house positions, there are few openings. Inside law firms, litigation associates regularly change tracks to the corporate side, even when it means losing years of training, to have a better shot at dot-com jobs.
A Harvard University football player as an undergrad, the 37-year-old Davis had spent his entire 13-year career at San Francisco's Hancock Rothert & Bunshoft, primarily defending British insurance giant Lloyd's of London.
The cases that crossed Davis' desk involved companies that were caught polluting the environment, who then sued Lloyd's claiming their policy required the insurer to pay for the cleanup.
Davis had a brush with handling matters as an in-house lawyer last year when his firm sent him to work in Lloyd's London office for four months.
He was being groomed to become Hancock Rothert's lead partner for Lloyd's. But the experience, in fact, sealed for him a desire he had harbored for years -- that he wanted to work in-house because of his close affiliation with his clients.
This, coupled with an earlier experience, would ultimately lead him to Yahoo.
In late 1997, Davis defended pro bono the Rainforest Action Network, a San Francisco-based environmental advocacy organization that was being sued because of alleged similarities between its own and another organization's Web site. The case was ultimately dismissed, but not before Davis became enamored of the Internet. In the fall of last year, through a friend at Yahoo, Davis applied for the in-house position.
"I was just happy to get an interview," explained Davis, one recent morning over an oatmeal breakfast in a San Francisco neighborhood cafe. "I knew my résumé didn't say I was ready to be an in-house lawyer at an Internet company, and I knew going in that I would be trying to convince people I had other skills."
Davis, a 1990 graduate of Tulane University School of Law, beat out hundreds of applicants for the Yahoo job, which pays less in salary than his partner draw but promises far more in stock options. The Santa Clara-based Internet pioneer, which has an in-house legal staff of about 25 under general counsel John Place Jr., was drawing from a deep pool of candidates.
Some of them had more relevant experience in the Internet industry than Davis, says associate GC Sobel, but few of the applicants could qualify as seasoned Internet lawyers.
"The Internet is such a new industry, you don't find, and you should not restrict your search to, people who have only Internet experiences," he says.
He explained that even though Davis could help illustrate his pattern of thinking by referring to an actual Internet dispute, it helped his application little. In the end, it was Davis' sense of judgment, his speed of thought and his sensitivities that won him the job, Sobel says.
"One of Yahoo's strengths is its people and sometimes we go for the non-obvious candidate. But that has worked out really well for us so far. Reggie blew the doors off on the intangible qualities we look for, like judgment and passion. He's a yahoo."
But Davis' one Internet case may have been at least a subtle factor.
Since his Rainforest Action Network case, Davis had been studying the issues facing Internet companies. Some of the first areas he had to examine in that dispute -- such as how to define jurisdiction of an Internet matter and what are the damages -- are among the most fundamental to all Internet companies.
"They're some of the first issues you always think about when an Internet company gets sued," Davis says, now that he can make comparisons between problems the Rainforest Action Network and Yahoo are up against.
Since landing at Yahoo in January, Davis has been mired anew in the challenges represented by the Internet, including the issue of privacy.
Yahoo and Dallas-based Universal Image Inc., which does business as Chalkboardtalk.com, are locked in dueling lawsuits that just began in the past four months. Universal was one of hundreds of content providers Broadcast.com had enlisted before being acquired by Yahoo. The company is claiming in Dallas County Superior Court that its contract entitles it to Yahoo's user data, something Yahoo is disputing with its own suit.
For the most part, however, Davis isn't fighting ongoing disputes, but instead is focusing on contract negotiations or labor disputes that have not yet moved into the courts. He's also still trying to integrate himself into his new digs by getting to know the individuals in different Yahoo divisions who may need him, the same kinds of people who used to be his clients.
"You try to network among the people who work in the company," Davis says, "and try to let them know you're there to solve problems."