"So what will happen to Sun's hefty legal department, which listed 170 lawyers in 2006?
""Unless they have a very unique area of expertise where there might be a need for Oracle, I would suggest they would start looking for jobs," said former BEA lawyer Friedman. "A year after the thing closes, my guess would be, less than 10 percent of the Sun legal department will be left."
"Any lawyer working with software should pretty much forget it, said Facer, because Oracle will use its own lawyers for that. "Sun's legal team, from that standpoint, won't be needed."
"However, he and others pointed out that since Sun is also in the hardware industry with its server business, more lawyers may get to stick around than when Oracle was simply swallowing software rivals.
""Certainly with Sun there's less overlap with technology, and therefore the patent lawyers and the licensing attorneys would have a little more job security than they might otherwise," said Cary Platkin, a solo practitioner who worked at another Oracle takeover target, Siebel Systems. Platkin left Siebel before the 2005 deal for other reasons."
