Apple Hires General Counsel From Oracle

Apple said Friday it hired Daniel Cooperman from Oracle to take the role of general counsel, in the company's second appointment of its top legal executive in the last year.

Apple said Friday it hired Daniel Cooperman from Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL) to take the role of general counsel, in the company's second appointment of its top legal executive in the last year.

Cooperman will join the company Nov. 1, replacing Donald Rosenberg, who is taking the general counsel job at wireless chip supplier Qualcomm after 10 months at Apple.

Cooperman is currently general counsel at Oracle and chairman of the Software & Information Industry Association trade group.

"Dan is a seasoned professional with extensive experience in securities compliance, intellectual property, litigation and corporate governance," Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said in a statement.

Both Apple and Qualcomm have faced their share of legal troubles in recent months.

Jobs has recently been asked to give a deposition in a case against the company's former general counsel by U.S. securities regulators, while Qualcomm has been dealt several legal setbacks in a patent dispute with rival Broadcom (NSDQ: BRCM) Corp .

Apple hired Rosenberg from IBM (NYSE: IBM) in November to fill the post vacated in May 2006 by longtime general counsel Nancy Heinen in the midst of a probe into Apple's stock options grants.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in April decided it would not pursue enforcement against Apple over its options grants. But it sued Heinen for backdating options grants to Jobs and other executives and did not rule out further civil claims against other Apple executives.

The company has said it found no wrongdoing by Jobs or current management in an internal probe.

Qualcomm's former general counsel, Lou Lupin, resigned in August after several setbacks in the Broadcom case, including a U.S. government ban on importing some wireless phones using its chips, and an increasingly bitter dispute with Nokia over technology patents.

Apple shares were down 88 cents at $153.62 while Qualcomm shares were up 23 cents to $42.46 in morning Nasdaq trading.

Source: Reuters (Reporting by Michele Gershberg)

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