Dale

About Dale

Dale Dietrich is a video game lawyer who works with the people who make games: studios, the founders who start them, and freelancers like composers, coders and artists. Called to the Ontario bar in 1995 and admitted in California in 1999, Dietrich runs Game Studio Law in Waterloo and has been taking on game clients since 2007.

Dietrich studied business at York's Schulich School and law at Osgoode Hall, spending the last year of law school working in French at the Université de Montréal on an exchange. While still a student, Dietrich worked in IBM Canada's Systems Integration Department and received two of the company's Value In performance awards. An IBM career looked likely until a strong LSAT result and an offer from Osgoode changed the plan.

Articling at Borden & Elliot (today Borden Ladner Gervais) alongside Fraser Mann is where Dietrich saw that tech law could be a real practice. From 1995 to 1998 Dietrich was an information technology associate at Smith Lyons in Toronto, a stint that included eight months on secondment to the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce's legal department as its IT law counsel. Silicon Valley came next: from 1998 to 2001, as a senior technology transactions associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto and San Francisco, Dietrich negotiated licensing and strategic partnership deals for Internet and e-commerce companies at every stage from start-up to post-IPO.

In the early 1980s Dietrich was typing game listings out of books and magazines into a Radio Shack computer, and soon wrote a centipede game in Basic. Programming and web development have stayed lifelong hobbies, and Dietrich built the family gift giving service wishhh.com. The moment that stuck came on November 15, 2001, Halo's launch day, when roaming that open, detailed world on the original Xbox left Dietrich hooked. Science fiction has long been another love, Star Trek's original series especially. What made Dietrich want a part in games was a soft spot for start-ups and a fascination with the industry's growth potential.