Steve Zipperstein '83 Elected to American Law Institute

Steve Zipperstein '83, Chief Legal Officer at BlackBerry Limited, has been elected to the American Law Institute. Widely considered the nation's most important non-governmental organization of legal reform, ALI oversees law reform projects that often form the basis of laws enacted across the country and become standards cited in judges' legal opinions, lawyers' briefs, and scholarly articles. 

At BlackBerry Limited, Zipperstein is responsible for worldwide legal, government relations, public policy, intellectual property litigation, compliance, regulatory, and corporate security. He previously served as General Counsel for Verizon Wireless from 2003 through 2011, and, prior to that, he served as Deputy General Counsel with corporate-wide responsibility for state regulatory, litigation, and compliance matters for GTE Corporation. Zipperstein also worked for almost 10 years with the United States Department of Justice as a federal prosecutor.

Zipperstein, who was an editor with the UC Davis Law Review and a member of the Moot Court Board during his time as a student at King Hall, has been a generous supporter of UC Davis School of Law.  During his tenure at Verizon, he helped to forge a partnership between Verizon and the Family Protection and Legal Assistance Clinic that resulted in donations of more than $200,000 to the Clinic from the Verizon Wireless HopeLine program and the Verizon Foundation.