Steve Jobs, Apple's confident leader, wasn't always so sure how to handle his lawyers, explains Catherine Dunn

Daniel Cooperman was on a business trip in China in August 2007 when his boss' best friend called him with a question. The friend in question was Steve Jobs, whose company had recently cycled through two top general counsel and was now facing a vacuum at the top of Apple's law department. "Look, obviously, I'm not doing this right," Cooperman recalls Jobs saying. "I need to know – what does it take?"

At the time, Cooperman was the general counsel at Oracle. When he returned to California, he met with Jobs at the chief executive's Palo Alto home one Saturday afternoon to explain how to build an in-house legal department. By the end of the day, Jobs had offered Cooperman the job at Apple. And when Cooperman accepted, it was with the blessing of Oracle's chief executive, Larry Ellison (at whose wedding Jobs was best man).

Jobs' death from pancreatic cancer last October – at the age of 56 – occasioned an outpouring of reflection on the man and the corporate culture he left behind. Cooperman had more to reflect on than most. Apple's legal strategy was (and continues to be) integral to the company's $300bn (£189bn) business, and ranges from protecting its signature logo and co-ordinating worldwide product launches to waging war over smartphone patents. Apple's top lawyers "are part of the senior management team," says Cooperman. "Their views are solicited about major issues."

Strong focus

When Cooperman took over Apple's legal department in November 2007, it marked the beginning of a new chapter for the world's most valuable tech company, as well as for Cooperman himself. Working so closely with Jobs gave him a chance to observe what made the chief executive so good. "He had the ability to shut things out of his mind and focus narrowly on one specific issue," recalls Cooperman, who retired from in-house work and returned to his old law firm, Bingham McCutchen, in 2009. "I often said that his greatest strength was his ability to say no. Because you can imagine that so many people came at him with ideas over the years."

In Cooperman's eyes, it was this focus that was inextricably bound to Jobs' ability to deliver the goods. "He focused on making excellent products that people would love, and not doing lots of other things that would distract from that mission," he says.

Jobs' path to success has become nearly mythical by now. He and Steve Wozniak started their personal computing business in the Jobs family garage in 1976. By 1980, Apple Computer, based in Cupertino, California, had gone public, netting Jobs an estimated $200m (£127m). In 1985, however, Jobs was run out in a now-infamous boardroom coup, only to be asked to return to rescue the struggling computer maker in 1997.

And the rest is history. Over the past decade, Jobs cemented the company's ever-increasing success, as well as his own legacy, by revitalising Apple's line of personal computers and launching the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

"His ability to stand atop a very complex organisation composed of software and hardware engineers – typically totally different mind-sets from different industries – and orchestrate them the way a symphony conductor would – that is a real art," says Cooperman.

Toil and trouble

Cooperman and Jobs first met after Jobs was ousted from Apple, when he started another computer company, NeXT Inc, and hired Cooperman to draft the incorporation papers. By the time they reconnected – two decades later – Apple's law department had taken some serious hits.

steve-jobs-on-ipadIn May 2006, Nancy Heinen, Jobs' longtime GC at both NeXT and Apple, left with no immediate explanation, which at the time seemed notable even for the famously tight-lipped company. The following month, Apple disclosed that an internal review had unearthed irregularities with company stock options. Early news reports suggested that it was Jobs who stood to benefit from backdated stock options. Ultimately, however, he was cleared, and it was Heinen who was eventually charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In 2008, Heinen agreed to pay $2.2m (£1.4m), although she neither admitted nor denied the allegations. Heinen didn't respond to requests for comment, but in March she did tell the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal that Jobs was her "business hero", and that her proudest work achievements had been those at Apple.

Six months after Heinen's departure, Donald Rosenberg was named as her replacement. Rosenberg had toiled at IBM for 30 years, rising to GC. He now occupies the same position at wireless technology company Qualcomm. However, he lasted only 10 months at Apple. The company provided no explanation when he left, and Rosenberg himself declined to comment for this article.

It was around this time that Jobs decided to call Cooperman. The lawyer had not planned to leave Oracle, where, in his own words, the legal department hummed along "with the precision of a Swiss watch". However, by the end of Cooperman's afternoon talk with Jobs, the marketing wizard had worked his magic.

'A true visionary'

Oracle's Ellison did not encourage his GC to leave, but he did impress on Cooperman the value of the opportunity. "He said, 'Look – Steve Jobs is one of the very few, perhaps the only person in Silicon Valley, who will have made a mark on his generation to the point that he will be remembered in 100 years as one of the true visionaries of our time.' And Larry doesn't say that about many people," says Cooperman.

The immediate issue that Cooperman faced when he took over Apple's legal team was restoring in-house morale. "As any department would be when you have so many changes in leadership, it was destabilised," confides Cooperman. It fell to him to restore "an even keel".

Cooperman's management philosophy is to eliminate organisational layers. This allows the GC to strengthen direct connections with lawyers in the field, he explains. The goal of this strategy is to foster an atmosphere in which lawyers "would be comfortable at any time picking up the phone and talking to the general counsel about a problem they're encountering".

An early test was the launch of the iPhone in 2007, which was a particularly demanding task for Cooperman's 100-lawyer department. The revolutionary mobile device was being introduced in 70 countries in three waves, all in the span of a few months. "This was a product the company had never made before, a phone, in a market it had never been in" – telecommunications – "that is highly regulated in almost every country. We had to do this from scratch. So we were scrambling, really scrambling," he explains.

Looking back on his time working for Jobs at Apple, Cooperman calls it "a very inspiring period. I just found it to be riveting. His strategic vision was so keen".

These days Apple's litigation agenda is driven by general counsel Bruce Sewell, who joined Apple from Intel in 2009, when Cooperman left. Since coming aboard, Sewell has used Apple's robust patent portfolio to file lawsuits around the world aimed at the chief competitors of the iPhone: mobile devices that run Google's Android operating system. A prominent example of those suits is a contentious battle with Samsung Electronics.

Embracing legal issues

For his part, Cooperman is teaching a course at Stanford University that stresses the inter-dependence between the success of a senior executive and the legal department. Though he doesn't reveal trade secrets in class –naturally – his curriculum does draw on his experiences at both Oracle and Apple.

Apple's executive team under Jobs was a textbook case of the kind of strong management practices that Cooperman teaches his students. At Apple, he says, "legal issues are embraced; the lawyers are not treated like plumbers – 'the pipe is broken, go fix it'." Rather, they are integrated into the business.

Cooperman also believes that Jobs' work methods hold an important lesson for GCs. "When you're the general counsel of a really rapidly growing company, there are so many issues, so many projects, so many challenges in managing the department," he explains. "Taking a leaf, if you will, from Steve's [book]: it is important to focus, to pick out just a select few and really work those issues to completion."

But that is not the part that Cooperman will remember best. He will remember Jobs. "For me, it was an extraordinary honour to be able to work with him," says Cooperman. "He has had an impact on people in ways we won't even know for many, many years."

This article first appeared in Corporate Counsel, a US affiliate title of Legal Week.