Top Apple Lawyer Sees Slight Pay Boost as Legal Docket Grows
Adams received $5 million in money, together with $1 million in income, and $22.1 million in inventory awards, Apple disclosed in an yearly proxy filing Thursday. She obtained virtually $27 million in 2021.
The concerns Apple is currently wrestling with include lawsuits, a unionization effort in merchants, a choosing slowdown, and a pushback about return-to-place of work protocols.
Apple hired Adams, a previous major law firm at Honeywell Worldwide Inc., to triumph the retiring D. Bruce Sewell as its regulation office chief in 2017. She is perennially one of the maximum-paid authorized chiefs among the US publicly traded businesses.
She been given $26 million in payment in 2020 and $25 million in 2019.
Past yr Adams oversaw a reorganization of Apple’s in-property lawful crew, according to memoranda attained by Bloomberg. The reshuffling made two new groups—product and regulatory, and company, professional, and compliance—within the Cupertino, Calif.-dependent company’s lawful purpose.
Apple named a new vice president of authorized previous October in Heather Grenier, a former associate at the regulation organization Morrison & Foerster who just lately was a senior director at the firm overseeing professional litigation and legal operations.
An Apple spokesman declined to talk about personnel matters.
The modifications happened soon after the departure in late 2021 of Apple’s previous chief litigation counsel, Noreen Krall, as well as the death in February 2022 of Douglas Vetter, a longtime affiliate standard counsel at the company.
Krall, a co-founder of ChIPs Community Inc., a nonprofit women’s technologies legislation group, spent a dozen many years at Apple. Her former work was eliminated in legal’s restructuring.
Apple also noticed its former head of company legislation, Gene Levoff, plead guilty last summer season to insider trading expenses. The business was sued in December by Jayna Richardson Whitt, an intellectual residence attorney who claims she was fired by Apple past calendar year for complaining about abuse by a male colleague.
Compliance, Privacy Improvements
Apple’s company, professional, and compliance group is now led by Kyle Andeer, one more longtime in-dwelling lawyer at the firm who most lately served as Apple’s main compliance officer and head of company legislation. Andeer’s portfolio now consists of anti-cash laundering, opposition, and privateness.
Andeer, who joined Apple in 2010 as the company’s first antitrust attorney, was named vice president of merchandise and regulatory regulation in Could 2022. Apple tapped Andeer to testify at a vital US Senate antitrust hearing in 2021 about its application retail store guidelines.
Heba Hamouda, a previous director of business law who has labored at Apple since 2011, was promoted to triumph Andeer as the company’s compliance main.
Bruce “B.J.” Watrous Jr., yet another veteran Apple attorney and former main industrial counsel and world head of security at the corporation, is now vice president of its company, business, and compliance authorized group. Apple to begin with employed Watrous in 2011 to be its top rated IP attorney.
Jane Horvath, a former senior director of world wide privateness at Apple who took on the job of chief privateness officer in 2021, is leaving the firm this thirty day period to return to personal apply. Bloomberg first reported final calendar year that Horvath would turn out to be a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which announced her hire Jan. 9.
Horvath reunites with Vivek Mohan, one more previous Apple privacy and cybersecurity lawyer who joined Gibson Dunn previous yr as co-chair of the firm’s artificial intelligence and automated systems observe.
Gibson Dunn and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison represented Apple in a extensive-working antitrust dispute with Epic Video games Inc. Apple prevailed in that fight irrespective of ongoing difficulties to its application shop.
Additional Authorized Promotions
Two other Apple in-household lawyers—Robert Windom and Susanne Geraghty—are now running the company’s written content and products and services regulation and industrial and global legislation groups, respectively.
Alexander Caminas was promoted in October to senior director of products and solutions regulation, a function that observed him choose about the company’s software regulation operate from Joyce Chow, who retired the subsequent thirty day period after three a long time at Apple.
Colette Reiner Mayer, another previous Morrison & Foerster husband or wife employed by Apple in late 2021 as its head of IP litigation, now stories to the company’s chief IP counsel Jeffrey Myers. Morrison & Foerster has been a common focus on for Apple’s recruiters.
Heather Mewes, a previous Fenwick & West associate who has used the past ten years at Apple, was elevated previous May possibly to head of licensing and IP transactions.
Mewes took about a function vacated that exact same month by previous IP transactions head Sarita Venkat, who left Apple to grow to be a deputy normal counsel for world litigation at Cisco Techniques Inc. Venkat is also a co-founder and co-host of the “Heels of Justice” podcast, which highlights gals in the authorized job.
Patent and IP-relevant disputes comprised approximately 40{c024931d10daf6b71b41321fa9ba9cd89123fb34a4039ac9f079a256e3c1e6e8} of Apple’s caseload in US federal courts given that 2007, in accordance to Bloomberg Legislation data. Apple employs a massive roster of regulation firms—from Significant Legislation giants to regional specialists—to provide its exterior counsel needs in lawful battles throughout different jurisdictions.
Searching Ahead
An on-line employment web page shows that Apple is on the lookout to employ the service of for a lot more than a dozen positions in its lawful group. The company has introduced on extra than 20 lawyers from Massive Law inside the earlier yr, in accordance to Bloomberg Law knowledge.
Some of those new recruits were produced to offset exits, which include that of Kathryn “Katie” Tague, a a few-yr veteran of Apple’s media content material and expert services crew.
Tague left the corporation previous Might to become general counsel for the XQ Institute, an Oakland, California-centered nonprofit backed by Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire widow of Apple co-founder Steve Work opportunities.
A spokeswoman for XQ, which is targeted on innovation in instruction, confirmed Tague took over in Could from former in-household attorneys Edward Garey and Mark Miller.