Revolving Door At Apple's General Counsel Office

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on September 28, 2007

Well that didn’t last. Word out of Apple this morning is that senior vice president and General Counsel Donald J. Rosenberg, who joined from IBM less than 11 months ago is out. The new general counsel, is Daniel Cooperman, senior VP and General Counsel at Oracle. He’s been on the job there since 1997, and will start at Apple on Nov 1. Hm. I wonder what’s up?

Update: I don’t know if this is a case of the plot thickening or not, but Donald Rosenberg’s new job is General Counsel at Qualcomm. Now Qualcomm has been in the fight of its legal life as my colleague Olga Kharif has been covering lately. Maybe it was just the prospect of a different kind of challenge. When Rosenberg joined in 2006, there were big questions over whether or not Apple or CEO Steve Jobs were going to catch any serious flack from the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding the whole stock options mess, which as we now know was the primary reason for the departure of former General Counsel Nancy Heinen. Now those fears are largely gone, except for the SEC’s lawsuit against Heinen, which in itself should be interesting if it ever gets to trial, seeing how Jobs has been subpoenaed and all.