Top Apple Lawyer Sees Slight Pay Boost as Legal Docket Grows
Adams acquired $5 million in income, which include $1 million in income, and $22.1 million in inventory awards, Apple disclosed in an once-a-year proxy filing Thursday. She obtained just about $27 million in 2021.
The troubles Apple is at present wrestling with incorporate lawsuits, a unionization hard work in merchants, a choosing slowdown, and a pushback above return-to-office environment protocols.
Apple employed Adams, a previous top law firm at Honeywell Worldwide Inc., to realize success the retiring D. Bruce Sewell as its legislation department chief in 2017. She is perennially a single of the highest-paid out authorized chiefs among the US publicly traded companies.
She received $26 million in compensation in 2020 and $25 million in 2019.
Last 12 months Adams oversaw a reorganization of Apple’s in-property legal group, according to memoranda attained by Bloomberg. The reshuffling developed two new groups—product and regulatory, and corporate, commercial, and compliance—within the Cupertino, Calif.-centered company’s lawful functionality.
Apple named a new vice president of authorized last October in Heather Grenier, a former partner at the law business Morrison & Foerster who not long ago was a senior director at the enterprise overseeing commercial litigation and authorized functions.
An Apple spokesman declined to talk about personnel issues.
The changes occurred just after the departure in late 2021 of Apple’s former chief litigation counsel, Noreen Krall, as properly as the dying in February 2022 of Douglas Vetter, a longtime associate standard counsel at the organization.
Krall, a co-founder of ChIPs Network Inc., a nonprofit women’s engineering law group, used a dozen yrs at Apple. Her former occupation was eliminated in legal’s restructuring.
Apple also observed its previous head of corporate law, Gene Levoff, plead guilty very last summer to insider buying and selling rates. The business was sued in December by Jayna Richardson Whitt, an intellectual house law firm who claims she was fired by Apple past calendar year for complaining about abuse by a male colleague.
Compliance, Privateness Alterations
Apple’s corporate, industrial, and compliance team is now led by Kyle Andeer, an additional longtime in-home lawyer at the corporation who most a short while ago served as Apple’s main compliance officer and head of company law. Andeer’s portfolio now includes anti-money laundering, competitors, and privateness.
Andeer, who joined Apple in 2010 as the company’s very first antitrust attorney, was named vice president of solutions and regulatory law in Could 2022. Apple tapped Andeer to testify at a critical US Senate antitrust listening to in 2021 about its app retail store policies.
Heba Hamouda, a previous director of industrial law who has labored at Apple considering the fact that 2011, was promoted to be successful Andeer as the company’s compliance chief.
Bruce “B.J.” Watrous Jr., yet another veteran Apple law firm and former chief business counsel and world wide head of stability at the organization, is now vice president of its corporate, commercial, and compliance legal team. Apple to begin with employed Watrous in 2011 to be its prime IP lawyer.
Jane Horvath, a previous senior director of global privateness at Apple who took on the part of chief privateness officer in 2021, is leaving the business this month to return to private apply. Bloomberg to start with noted past calendar year that Horvath would turn out to be a lover at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which introduced her seek the services of Jan. 9.
Horvath reunites with Vivek Mohan, a further former Apple privacy and cybersecurity attorney who joined Gibson Dunn very last year as co-chair of the firm’s artificial intelligence and automated systems follow.
Gibson Dunn and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison represented Apple in a very long-running antitrust dispute with Epic Online games Inc. Apple prevailed in that combat irrespective of ongoing issues to its app retail outlet.
Additional Lawful Promotions
Two other Apple in-house lawyers—Robert Windom and Susanne Geraghty—are now running the company’s content material and solutions law and business and intercontinental regulation teams, respectively.
Alexander Caminas was promoted in Oct to senior director of products and solutions legislation, a function that observed him consider about the company’s software package legislation operate from Joyce Chow, who retired the subsequent thirty day period soon after three many years at Apple.
Colette Reiner Mayer, another former Morrison & Foerster partner hired by Apple in late 2021 as its head of IP litigation, now studies to the company’s main IP counsel Jeffrey Myers. Morrison & Foerster has been a well-liked concentrate on for Apple’s recruiters.
Heather Mewes, a former Fenwick & West husband or wife who has put in the earlier ten years at Apple, was elevated past May perhaps to head of licensing and IP transactions.
Mewes took around a purpose vacated that similar month by former IP transactions head Sarita Venkat, who left Apple to become a deputy general counsel for international litigation at Cisco Devices Inc. Venkat is also a co-founder and co-host of the “Heels of Justice” podcast, which highlights gals in the legal job.
Patent and IP-connected disputes comprised about 40% of Apple’s caseload in US federal courts since 2007, in accordance to Bloomberg Regulation info. Apple employs a big roster of legislation firms—from Significant Law giants to regional specialists—to serve its outside the house counsel requirements in authorized battles throughout a variety of jurisdictions.
On the lookout Forward
An online work web page exhibits that Apple is looking to use for additional than a dozen positions inside of its lawful crew. The firm has introduced on extra than 20 attorneys from Huge Law within just the earlier 12 months, in accordance to Bloomberg Legislation info.
Some of those new recruits were being produced to offset exits, like that of Kathryn “Katie” Tague, a 3-12 months veteran of Apple’s media articles and services crew.
Tague left the business final Might to grow to be normal counsel for the XQ Institute, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit backed by Laurene Powell Careers, the billionaire widow of Apple co-founder Steve Careers.
A spokeswoman for XQ, which is targeted on innovation in training, confirmed Tague took about in Could from previous in-residence legal professionals Edward Garey and Mark Miller.