After Paul Dacier became EMC Corporation’s first in-house attorney in 1990, he soon realized that the data storage company would need more than patents and lawyers to protect its intellectual property. It would have to become an aggressive litigant. Dacier was promoted to general counsel in 1993, the same year that Storage Technology Corporation sued Hopkinton, Massachusettsbased EMC. International Business Machines Corporation also had a pending suit against EMC.
"I thought, wait a minute, these guys are trying to eat our lunch," Dacier says. "And I realized that if we were going to survive, we’d need to be strategic and very aggressive on the legal side." EMC filed a countersuit for defamation against IBM, which dropped its case. Dacier’s company also took StorageTek to trial, and won.
