Twitter expands executive team with hire from Google

Alexander Macgillivray was deputy general counsel for products and intellectual property at Google, and played a high profile role in Google's recent $125m settlement with authors over the scanning of books of out of-print library books.

He follows Google visual design lead Douglas Bowman who recently joined Twitter to as creative director, which the Justice Department is looking into for violations of antitrust laws.

At Google Macgillivray also worked on Viacom's copyright lawsuit against YouTube and its wrangle with Associated Press over claims of misuse of content.

Prior to joining the search giant he worked at Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

As Twitter continues to grow so do the legal claims that it faces. On joining Macgillivray will have to deal with issues such as people in the public domain complaining that their identities are being taken.

This was highlighted by a lawsuit brought forward by the Tony La Russa general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball club.

He launched a legal case, which he later dropped, claiming someone created an account and sent out derogatory tweets in his name. La Russa argued that the tweets damaged his reputation.

As Twitter expands and hires more staff one question it has been facing, according to a Techcrunch report, is whether it plans to sell the company sooner rather than later.

Stone Biz and co have been telling potential candidates that they have they don't plan to sell any time soon.