Qualcomm (QCOM) Lieutenant Walks The Plank

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Qualcomm’s (QCOM) legal strategy for defending its intellectual property has been a mess recently. It lost a key ruling with the ITC. The agency said that because the company infringed on certain Broadcom (BRCM) patents that handsets with QCOM technology in them would be banned from import.

Qualcomm also lost a key patent case to Broadcom, and last week the judge in the case doubled the award.

Now, Qualcomm’s general counsel is on his way. The CEO, Paul Jacobs, son of the company’s founder, gets to stay. But, at least the move is a start.

Qualcomm needs to quickly make peace offerings to Broadcom and Nokia (NOK). QCOM is in a licensing battle with the big handset company which is its largest customer.

With a new person running the legal department, the company has a chance to take a fresh approach to litigating every problem. But, the window is probably not open for long.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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