With a stated mission to “connect everything,” Irvine’s Broadcom Corp. sees the world as flat — with a little help from its devices. An increasingly global, fabless maker of chips used in communications, the company estimates that more than 99 percent of Internet traffic crosses at least one Broadcom chip. These can be found in mobiles and tablets from Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and Motorola Mobility, enabling devices to connect to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The company also provides home entertainment and broadband products and silicon and software infrastructure solutions. In 2012, the company pulled in revenues of $8.0 billion. It recently unveiled plans to debut the industry’s smallest 4G LTE-advanced modem for smartphones and tablets in 2014 and will continue the rollout of technologies like 5G WiFi in routers and mobiles.
DAILY DUTIES
When Senior Vice President and Senior Deputy General Counsel DeAnn Work joined Broadcom four years ago, everyone in the legal department was in California — a very domestically focused department despite the company’s international reach. By making strategic additions across the footprint with a handful of hires in Europe and Asia, Work says that legal now better matches the scope of the company. Where possible, legal partners with other business lines that might be working abroad in order to make their work serve multiple purposes. Broadcom has a legal team of nearly 70 people, just over half of whom are lawyers. More than 50 percent of the attorneys are women, and more than 40 percent are people of color. Work estimates that the department has added between 10 to 12 people since she arrived, to keep pace with the company’s expansion.
