RIM may be hiring lawyers to overhaul BlackBerry business

11605updated 01:05 am EDT, Sat April 21, 2012 RIM talking restucturing plan with law firm

New leaks have uncovered more of RIM's possible reorganization plans. The Reuters tip asserted that it had hired lawyers at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley, and McCloy to outline possible corporate plans. These could range from anything as simple as licensing patents to selling off parts of the company or making alliances with other companies.Delving deeper, the contacts saw RIM trying to extract more value out of the upcoming BlackBerry 10 platform and potentially resuming some of ex-CEO Jim Balsillie's plans to open BlackBerry services to Android, iPhone, or other platforms. RIM had been thinking about these for some time and had a "very mature strategy," an unnamed insider said.

Balsillie had resigned from the board in what's now interpreted as a sign of possible conflict. The rest of the board of directors had supposedly been worried that allowing access to BlackBerry Messenger and other services on competing platforms would only dilute the BlackBerry's share even further. The takeover of NewBay hadn't been an attempt to grow a cloud service but to port BlackBerry services elsewhere.

Neither RIM nor the attorneys would comment.

While some of the talk of exporting services woill have been active for several months or more, the hiring of JPMorgan and now lawyers reflect a sudden sense of urgency under new CEO Thorsten Heins. At first saying there were few changes he needed to make, a review in just several weeks revealed a need for a change in strategy that was urgent enough for RIM to keep all options open. Although RIM plans to remain independent for now, Heins has willing to keep all options open, including possible takeovers by others.



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