US software giant Adobe has hired Louise Pentland as chief legal officer, replacing Gloria Chen who has been acting as interim legal head since late last year after the departure of former general counsel Dana Rao.

Chen will resume her role as chief people officer and executive vice president for employee experience. Pentland joins from Roku, where she was GC. At Adobe she will lead the company’s legal and government relations teams, reporting directly to chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen.

San Jose, California-based Adobe makes software for the creative industries, including photo editing program Photoshop, video editing platform Premiere Pro and other creative industry staples such as InDesign, Illustrator and After Effects.

Narayen said: “Louise’s decades of experience driving transformations at global companies and leading cutting-edge legal organisations make her well suited to help drive Adobe’s continued growth.” 

Pentland arrives after less than a year at Roku, which she joined in July last year from the Walt Disney Company where she was chief counsel for its Disney Experiences division, which oversees its theme parks, cruise operations and other consumer products.

Prior to that she spent more than seven years at payments giant PayPal, most of them as chief business and legal officer. She also spent more than 16 years at Nokia, six of them as CLO, having originally joined in 1998 as legal counsel from cosmetics company Avon.

Chen, meanwhile, has been serving as interim legal head after Rao announced he was stepping down from the GC role last September. Rao had been at Adobe for more than 12 years, seven of them as GC. He joined in 2012 from Microsoft, where he was associate GC for IP and licensing. Prior to his time in-house, Dao spent four years as a patent attorney at Fenwick & West.

Writing on LinkedIn last year, Dao said he wanted to take a break to spend more time with his family and, once “rested and recharged”, he will look to his next challenge.

In other recent US tech moves, earlier this month Lumen Technologies hired former Motorola GC Mark Hacker, replacing interim legal chief Meredith Hayes who had been standing in since Chad Ho departed in February. Also in May, US video games industry body the Entertainment Software Association hired Stan McCoy as GC, replacing Gina Vetere who left in January.