Suchitra Narayen and her team of roughly a dozen lawyers and staffers advise Oracle Corp. on its supply chain management issues. No two days are quite the same, with new rules constantly emerging to regulate what can and can’t be used in products and how certain materials should be sourced. Whether it’s a natural disaster in another country or a smelter appropriately treating its workers, Narayen, who joined Oracle through the company’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, says she and her colleagues try to find the best path for successfully manufacturing products.
What does a supply chain lawyer do? The three basic areas are transactional—we have to work with a lot of suppliers. We do the contracts that establish that relationship or the parameters within which the business has to engage with those folks. We also deal with a lot of regulatory requirements. For example, if you took toothpaste, there’s probably regulations about what you can put or not put into toothpaste because people are putting it in their mouths. Similarly, there are rules about what you can put or not put into electronic products. There are rules about lead and not having lead. There are rules about whether you can or cannot have mercury because that will affect how you dispose of things. There’s a lot of regulations about how things can be manufactured and sold and then supported out there in the world. We deal with that. Then there’s general advice and counsel on new issues because the law is always changing. The business changes so when people don’t know the answer to something or some new model they need support on from a programmatic perspective, we’ll provide support for that. We don’t always know the answer but we do try hard to figure it out.
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