Alphabet’s Legal Chief Saw Total Compensation Soar 67% Last Year

Alphabet Inc. gave over $47 million in compensation to top lawyer J. Kent Walker Jr. as the Google parent company faced antitrust scrutiny and other legal issues.

Walker’s pay package, disclosed Friday, was nearly 67% higher than the nearly $14.7 million earmarked for him in 2021.

Walker received $24.4 million in total compensation last year, according to a proxy statement filed by the Mountain View, Calif.-based company. The bulk of Walker’s pay came from a nearly $22.7 million stock award. He’ll receive additional equity awards in the company going forward valued at $23 million, Alphabet disclosed in a separate securities filing Friday.

Alphabet announced in January that it was laying off about 12,000 workers, or 6% of its global headcount, joining other tech giants in slashing their ranks.

The company is set to head to trial next year in an antitrust case filed against it by the US Department of Justice. The government agency is trying to break up Alphabet’s lucrative advertising technology business.

Walker, a veteran legal and policy strategist, joined Google as its general counsel in 2006 after serving as deputy general counsel at eBay Inc. He was promoted more than a decade later to lead Alphabet’s legal, policy, trust and safety, and corporate philanthropy teams.

Walker has been a key advocate for the company on competition, content, copyright, and privacy issues and has “in-depth knowledge of the technology sector,” Alphabet said in its proxy rationale for Walker’s compensation.

In a 2020 blog post, Walker called “deeply flawed” a separate monopoly case filed against Google by state attorneys general over the company’s display advertising business. That litigation remains ongoing.

Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, a longtime legal adviser to Alphabet, is defending the company in that lawsuit and the Justice Department case. Google sought to dismiss the latter this year after losing a bid to move the DOJ dispute from a federal court in Alexandria, Va., to New York.

Alphabet’s proxy noted its chief executive, Sundar Pichai, received nearly $226 million in total compensation last year. That sum makes Pichai one of the highest-paid executives in Silicon Valley.