RIM Lawyer Departs As Restructruing Continues

Karima Bawa, RIM’s chief legal officer, has left the company, becoming the latest long-serving executive to leave the beleaguered BlackBerry manufacturer since Thorsten Heins became CEO earlier this year.

The move comes ahead of more expected job cuts at the company as it seeks to revive its fortunes following a number of setbacks in recent years.

Further casualties

Bawa joined RIM in 2000 and was promoted to general counsel and chief legal officer in late 2010. She litigated many of the company’s patent disputes and commercial deals. RIM said she will stay with the company while a replacement is found.

Thorsten Heins was appointed CEO in January, replacing longtime co-chief executives Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. He has begun a restructuring of the company and Bawa’s departure follows that of chief operating officer Jim Rowan, head of software David Yach, senior vice president for the BlackBerry platform Alan Brenner, and Alistair Mitchell, vice president for BlackBerry Messenger.

The restructuring is not only going to affect those at executive level. The company plans to reduce its workforce from 16,500 to around 10,000 by early next year, according to reports, with redundancies believed to affect those in RIM’s legal, marketing, sales, operations and human resource divisions.

RIM has endured a number of difficult years as BlackBerry sales have been eroded by competition from rival smartphones such as those running Google’s Android mobile operating system and the Apple iPhone.

Its suffering was compounded last October by a worldwide data outage that left users around the world unable to access BlackBerry data services. Much of RIM’s hopes rest on the launch of smartphones running BlackBerry OS 10, which is due to launch later this year, following a number of delays.

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