Twitter Hires Former Google VP and Deputy General Counsel Of Seven Years, Nicole Wong

Today, Twitter made a huge splash with Nicole Wong starting her new role at the company. The Next Web plucked this bit of news off of the wires. Why is this big? Wong was formerly a VP and Deputy General Counsel at Google. She spent over seven years with the company in the same role. Before Google, Wong was a partner at Perkins Coie LLP.

The fact that Twitter is filling these types of roles is a pretty important signal that the company could be gearing up for an IPO.

Wong announced her new job today via…Twitter, of course.

As AllThingsD notes, Wong joins a number of former Googlers at the Flock, “including general counsel Alex MacGillivray, and recent new hire associate counsel Amy Keating.”

As Twitter marches towards going public, having a solid team of legal experts is absolutely essential. Since the company is dealing with more and more legal obstacles and issues, there is absolutely no way that the public market would welcome things as they are, without the type of experienced team that Google has today.

In a piece with LawJobs in 2010, Twitter in-house legal counsel Bakari Brock said this about the company structure: “Here, we have to be, in essence, a jack-of-all-trades. And nine times out of 10, the issues haven’t been written about. We’re dealing with cutting edge technology.”

Basically, the legal issues that Twitter could face in the future haven’t surfaced. They simply don’t exist.

General Counsel Alexander Macgillivray elaborated on how the legal team works with the rest of Twitter:

We’re much more integrated into the fabric of the company. We’re thinking about goals at the same time we’re figuring out how to implement those goals.

That type of structure might be something that people might invest in on the open market.

[Photo credit: Flickr]