Larry Sonsini: "I never took the position that pretexting is legal."
"The press is entirely wrong," Hewlett-Packard counsel Larry Sonsini just told a Congressional hearing panelist. "I never took the position that pretexting is legal." He's speaking now at the hearing about HP's pretexting case.
Sonsini is one of Silicon Valley's most powerful lawyers, representing many high-profile firms (such as Sun Microsystems); the panelist is chastising him for not going after the leaking board member sooner. "I was aware," he says, in early 2005. He says he talked to each director, reminded them of their confidentiality agreements, and that now-confessed leaker George Keyworth denied leaking any information. "The way I dealt with [the leak] was in the board room," says Keyworth.
