SAN FRANCISCO — Dawn Smith made partner two years ago at Morrison & Foerster. Now she’ll be general counsel at one of Silicon Valley’s biggest new companies, VMWare Inc.

The virtualization software company, which has a market cap of $16.7 billion and a legal department of 75 people, announced in a Sept. 23 8-K filing that Smith would be replacing Rashmi Garde as legal chief. In the filing, the Palo Alto company said only that Garde “departed” from her role on Sept. 22.