Apple announced yesterday that current Senior VP and General Counsel Daniel Cooperman is retiring at the end of September and that he will be replaced by Bruce Sewell.
D. Bruce Sewell (the "D" standards for Durward) becomes the fourth General Counsel to be hired at Apple since the return of Steve Jobs. Eighteen months after Apple purchased NeXT in March of 1996 and brought Steve Jobs back to the Apple, Apple hired Nancy Heinen to serve as General Counsel and Secretary, a job Heinen had also held at NeXT. Heinen held the position until May of 2006, when she resigned shortly before Apple admitted to some irregularities in the backdating of stock options. Heinen eventually settled claims brought by the SEC for about $2.2 million, without admitting to any of the SEC's charges.
Six months after Heinen left Apple, Donald Rosenberg became Apple's Senior Vice President and General Counsel in November of 2006. Rosenberg had previously held the same position at IBM, where he had worked for over 30 years. But Rosenberg did not stay at Apple very long, leaving after only 10 months to take the General Counsel position at Qualcomm, a position he still holds today.
In September of 2007, the same time that Apple announced the departure of Rosenberg, Apple hired Daniel Cooperman to serve as its Senior Vice President and General Counsel. Cooperman had previously served as General Counsel for Oracle for 11 years and before that was a partner in the San Francisco office of the firm now known as Bingham McCutchen. Apple announced yesterday that Cooperman will retire at the end of this month, which is presumably the reason that Apple sought and hired Sewell. [UPDATE 3/17/10: After taking a break for a few months, Cooperman returned to Bingham on March 16, 2010, as reported in this Law.com article.]
Sewell thus becomes the third Apple GC in as many years. Sewell comes to Apple from Intel, where he has worked since
1995 and where, since 1994, he served as General Counsel overseeing Intel's 600
in-house attorneys and policy professionals. Here is an interview with Sewell on the Intel website in which he discusses the importance of IP when establishing standards. And here is a link to a short clip on YouTube if you want to hear Sewell speak. Before Intel, Sewell
worked at Brown & Bain, which became a part of Perkins Coie
in 2004, and before that he was an associate at the firm now known as Schnader. Sewell graduated from George Washington Law School in D.C. in 1986.
This is not the first time that Sewell will work on Apple's legal matters. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, legendary tech IP attorney Jack Brown of Brown & Bain represented Apple in the lawsuit Apple filed against Microsoft alleging that Microsoft had improperly copied the "look and feel" of Apple’s Macintosh operating system for Microsoft’s Windows 2.03 and 3.0 programs. Sewell worked on this litigation under Jack Brown while he was at the firm. Apple lost that case, in part because of a provision in a 1985 licensing agreement between Apple and Microsoft. Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 35 F.3d 1435 (9th Cir. 1994). One wonders how different Windows might be today if Apple had won.
I'm sure that one of the best perks of Bruce Sewell's new job is that he gets a free iPhone. Perhaps Sewell will become one of the many attorneys who regularly reads iPhone J.D. (Just in case: Welcome, Bruce!)
