“Apple Inc’s chief patent counsel will soon leave the company, at a time when the iPhone maker is fighting numerous legal battles around the world, according to a source familiar with the situation,” Dan Levine and Poornima Gupta report for Reuters. “Apple is engaged in an expanding web of litigation concerning smartphone patents, mostly with phonemakers using Google’s rival Android software.”

“It was unclear why Richard ‘Chip’ Lutton Junior, who manages the iPhone maker’s patent portfolio, is leaving the company,” Levine and Gupta report. “However, BJ Watrous, a former deputy general counsel with Hewlett Packard, is now listed as Apple’s chief IP counsel on Watrous’s LinkedIn web page.”

MacDailyNews Take: BJ replaces Chip. Is this a legal department or a ’70s sitcom after a contract dispute?

Levine and Gupta report, “Lutton’s voicemail was still set up at Apple on Monday, but he will be leaving Apple soon, perhaps in the next month, said the source familiar with the situation. Watrous was deputy general counsel at Hewlett-Packard in charge of IP licensing. Apple’s intellectual property team has been on a hiring spree lately, snapping up litigation specialist Noreen Krall from Sun Microsystems.”

Read more in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Brawndo Drinker" for the heads up.]