Before he became general counsel at Apple in 2007, Oracle’s then-GC Daniel Cooperman was on a business trip in China and his boss’s best friend called him with a question. That friend was Steve Jobs, whose company had cycled through two top lawyers back-to-back and was now facing a vacuum in Apple’s law department. “He said, ‘look, obviously I’m not doing this right,’” Cooperman recalls. Jobs went on: “‘I need to know, what does it take?’”
Back in California, Cooperman met with Jobs at the chief executive’s house one Saturday afternoon to explain how to build an in-house legal department. By day’s end, Jobs — who was the best man at Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s wedding — was offering Apple’s GC spot to Ellison’s top lawyer. And when Cooperman eventually accepted (with Ellison’s support), it marked the beginning of a new chapter for the world’s most valuable tech company, where legal issues have been embraced by the corporate culture that Jobs so painstakingly tended.
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