Sony Interactive Entertainment Corp. has hired a new top antitrust and public policy lawyer in Gregory McCurdy, who held a similar position at Uber Technologies.
McCurdy, Sony’s new senior director for competition and regulatory affairs, arrives as the company’s gaming subsidiary recently made a key acquisition and scuttled an antitrust class action. He left Uber last month, shortly before the ridesharing giant’s former top European lobbyist leaked a trove of company documents.
A Sony spokesperson confirmed McCurdy’s hire, which he announced in a recent message posted to his LinkedIn profile.
“The world of video games is fascinating and will be a great new adventure for me,” McCurdy said via LinkedIn. He spent more than 15 years as a senior litigation and policy lawyer for Microsoft Corp. prior to joining Uber in 2015. “I know it a bit from my Microsoft days when Xbox launched to compete with PlayStation,” McCurdy said.
His senior director role at Sony is a new one, per an online posting for the job. The posting said the person filling the role would would become a “senior level member” of the PlayStation video game console maker’s global legal leadership and “primary competition and regulatory counsel” for the company’s business worldwide.
McCurdy didn’t respond to a request for comment. Nor did Stephanie Burns, who joined Sony last year as legal chief for its San Mateo, Calif.-based gaming unit.
That business includes PlayStation and the video game company Bungie Inc., whose $3.6 billion sale to Sony closed earlier this month. Sony reportedly has plans to turnBungie into a subscription service for video games.
Sony and its lawyers from Shearman & Sterling also scored a win this week by convincing a federal judge in California to dismiss a putative class action accusing its PlayStation store of anti-competitive practices. McCurdy, a former co-chair of the American Bar Association’s antitrust committee, is well-versed on such issues.
At Uber, he led a team handling US antitrust litigation and merger clearance proceedings. McCurdy was also previously Microsoft’s first antitrust litigator in Europe, where he spent eight years managing antitrust proceedings before the European Commission in Brussels and appeals to courts in Luxembourg.
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