Hewlett-Packard’s Legal Chief Latest to Jump Ship
HP’s general counsel Michael Holston has left the company to pursue other opportunities, according to company officials. Fenwick & West LLP partner David Healy is serving as interim counsel until a replacement will be found.
Holston has been serving as the electronics maker’s head of legal affairs since 2007, and the timing of his resignation is rather conspicuous.
The company is currently in a middle of a transition, and has more than enough legal issues on its hands. Chief executive Meg Whitman is doing some damage control to repair a few blunders made under the two previous CEOs. That includes the decision to keep HP’s $42 billion PC unit, and a number of shareholders lawsuit that concern the severance package Mark Hurd, one of those former chiefs, received after his scandalous departure. There’s also the on-going legal clash with Oracle.
“Holston leaves as Hewlett-Packard is engaged in litigation with rival Oracle Corp. over the software company’s plan to stop developing products for Intel Corp.’s Itanium chip, which Hewlett-Packard uses in some servers. A trial may take place next year.”
The Oracle case has taken a lot of twists and turns ever since HP first filed court papers. The former has most recently involved the Mark Hurk scandal with the trial, and the exchange of legal accusations rages on.
HP’s transition has resulted in several layoffs recently, and causing enough concern that other top executives are leaving the company as well. Last month it was webOS application development head Michael Rizkalla who left HP. webOS is perhaps one of the most turbulent sides of Whiteman’s changes to Hewlett-Packard’s internal affairs: in November it was still presumed that the company will simply pull the plug on Palm’s OS, but a few days ago the story took a 90 degree turn. HP open-sourced webOS and Whitman hinted towards the possibility of new tablets powered by the platform– among other things.
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