Top Apple Lawyer Sees Slight Pay Boost as Legal Docket Grows
Adams received $5 million in dollars, including $1 million in income, and $22.1 million in inventory awards, Apple disclosed in an annual proxy submitting Thursday. She obtained nearly $27 million in 2021.
The issues Apple is at present wrestling with contain lawsuits, a unionization hard work in outlets, a selecting slowdown, and a pushback about return-to-business office protocols.
Apple employed Adams, a previous top lawyer at Honeywell Intercontinental Inc., to do well the retiring D. Bruce Sewell as its regulation division leader in 2017. She is perennially just one of the highest-compensated authorized chiefs among US publicly traded organizations.
She been given $26 million in payment in 2020 and $25 million in 2019.
Past yr Adams oversaw a reorganization of Apple’s in-household lawful crew, in accordance to memoranda acquired by Bloomberg. The reshuffling created two new groups—product and regulatory, and company, commercial, and compliance—within the Cupertino, Calif.-based company’s authorized perform.
Apple named a new vice president of lawful last October in Heather Grenier, a previous spouse at the legislation firm Morrison & Foerster who not long ago was a senior director at the organization overseeing professional litigation and authorized operations.
An Apple spokesman declined to discuss staff issues.
The improvements occurred soon after the departure in late 2021 of Apple’s previous main litigation counsel, Noreen Krall, as well as the death in February 2022 of Douglas Vetter, a longtime affiliate basic counsel at the enterprise.
Krall, a co-founder of ChIPs Network Inc., a nonprofit women’s engineering law team, invested a dozen many years at Apple. Her previous position was removed in legal’s restructuring.
Apple also saw its previous head of company regulation, Gene Levoff, plead guilty previous summer time to insider buying and selling expenses. The business was sued in December by Jayna Richardson Whitt, an intellectual assets law firm who promises she was fired by Apple past yr for complaining about abuse by a male colleague.
Compliance, Privateness Modifications
Apple’s corporate, commercial, and compliance group is now led by Kyle Andeer, yet another longtime in-home attorney at the firm who most recently served as Apple’s chief compliance officer and head of corporate law. Andeer’s portfolio now consists of anti-funds laundering, competition, and privacy.
Andeer, who joined Apple in 2010 as the company’s first antitrust law firm, was named vice president of items and regulatory regulation in May well 2022. Apple tapped Andeer to testify at a key US Senate antitrust listening to in 2021 about its app keep policies.
Heba Hamouda, a former director of industrial regulation who has labored at Apple due to the fact 2011, was promoted to triumph Andeer as the company’s compliance main.
Bruce “B.J.” Watrous Jr., a further veteran Apple attorney and former main industrial counsel and world-wide head of stability at the business, is now vice president of its corporate, professional, and compliance legal group. Apple to begin with hired Watrous in 2011 to be its leading IP lawyer.
Jane Horvath, a previous senior director of worldwide privacy at Apple who took on the role of main privateness officer in 2021, is leaving the firm this month to return to private practice. Bloomberg very first reported last 12 months that Horvath would come to be a associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which announced her employ the service of Jan. 9.
Horvath reunites with Vivek Mohan, one more previous Apple privateness and cybersecurity lawyer who joined Gibson Dunn past year as co-chair of the firm’s synthetic intelligence and automatic devices observe.
Gibson Dunn and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison represented Apple in a lengthy-jogging antitrust dispute with Epic Games Inc. Apple prevailed in that battle inspite of ongoing problems to its application retail store.
Much more Lawful Promotions
Two other Apple in-dwelling lawyers—Robert Windom and Susanne Geraghty—are now operating the company’s written content and products and services legislation and professional and international law groups, respectively.
Alexander Caminas was promoted in Oct to senior director of solutions regulation, a position that observed him choose in excess of the company’s program legislation perform from Joyce Chow, who retired the adhering to month following three a long time at Apple.
Colette Reiner Mayer, one more previous Morrison & Foerster spouse employed by Apple in late 2021 as its head of IP litigation, now experiences to the company’s main IP counsel Jeffrey Myers. Morrison & Foerster has been a preferred focus on for Apple’s recruiters.
Heather Mewes, a former Fenwick & West companion who has spent the previous ten years at Apple, was elevated last May to head of licensing and IP transactions.
Mewes took in excess of a role vacated that similar thirty day period by former IP transactions head Sarita Venkat, who still left Apple to turn into a deputy typical 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 women in the legal profession.
Patent and IP-linked disputes comprised about 40% of Apple’s caseload in US federal courts considering the fact that 2007, in accordance to Bloomberg Legislation knowledge. Apple employs a significant roster of legislation firms—from Huge Regulation giants to regional specialists—to serve its exterior counsel desires in lawful battles throughout many jurisdictions.
Wanting Ahead
An on the internet positions web page exhibits that Apple is on the lookout to seek the services of for more than a dozen positions in just its lawful staff. The company has introduced on additional than 20 attorneys from Big Legislation in the previous 12 months, in accordance to Bloomberg Law info.
Some of people new recruits were being designed to offset exits, together with that of Kathryn “Katie” Tague, a a few-12 months veteran of Apple’s media information and products and services workforce.
Tague still left the organization very last May well to turn out to be normal counsel for the XQ Institute, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit backed by Laurene Powell Employment, the billionaire widow of Apple co-founder Steve Employment.
A spokeswoman for XQ, which is focused on innovation in schooling, verified Tague took about in May from previous in-home attorneys Edward Garey and Mark Miller.
