[2][3][4] Davis began his professional career by establishing the intellectual property practice at the firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe in San Francisco, California.
The board of directors promoted him from senior vice president to replace Jim Levy shortly after the acquisition of Infocom, in the hopes of stemming the continuing financial damage from the crash.
[5] He had opposed the merger, and many Infocom employees believed he was deliberately working against them, changing processes that had made the game business successful.
The turnaround effort was stymied after a huge damages award for infringement of Magnavox's original home video game patents was upheld on appeal in 1988.
[9] Kotick and his team then filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in cooperation with Magnavox parent company Philips in a leveraged recapitalization of Activision,[10] as it was renamed in 1992.
He led Digimarc from start up in 1997 to a more than US$100 million public company supplying digital watermarking technologies to national and state governments and to the media industry.