Rambus Legal Chief Quits… Better or Worse? (RMBS)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Rambus Inc. (NASDAQ:RMBS) announced after the close that its senior legal advisor John Danforth who had been Senior Legal Advisor since July 2006, and prior to that had been its first general counsel.  He had been working under a January 2006 employment agreement, which, ran through October 22, 2007 and the resignation is effective October 22, 2007.

“We want to thank John for his years of hard work and loyal service,” said Tom Lavelle, senior vice president and general counsel for Rambus. “The Company had significant litigation successes during his tenure. The Company is particularly pleased with, among other things, John’s work in defending the Company’s intellectual property rights, including obtaining positive outcomes in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in the Infineon case, and in the first two phases of the ongoing Hynix patent case. In these and other areas, the Company overcame significant legal hurdles, which John and his team addressed in a highly professional and effective manner. We thank John for his years of hard work for Rambus and wish him the best in his future endeavors.” 

Normally we’d not even give this very much of a thought.  But Rambus is a company which has been a basically a lawsuit company to protect its revenue stream over its design patents and licenses.  Danforth was instrumental during part of the Hynix case and winning the Infineon case.  Here is a full link to the Rambus litigation site.

24/7 Wall St. would like to know if this means the legal issues are winding down and things are stabilizing, or if this means they are about to heat back up.  That probably won’t be known for some time and we’ll wait to see the analyst calls tomorrow and Monday.  This week the company announced it had regained NASDAQ compliance and this morning it set October 31 as its earnings date.

Jon C. Ogg
October 25, 2007

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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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