Snap Spends $15 Million on Legal Fees, Doubles Payout for GC

Snap Inc.’s longtime general counsel Michael O’Sullivan saw his pay package more than double last year, to almost $9.4 million, according to a securities filing by the company.

Snap, the parent company of social media platform Snapchat, disclosed in a 10-K filing Wednesday that O’Sullivan earned a stock award valued at nearly $8.5 million in addition to roughly $855,800 in base salary and $24,300 in additional benefits. It’s a sizable increase over the $4.6 million in total compensation that O’Sullivan received from the company in 2022 and $5.4 million for 2021.

The filing noted that Snap paid $12.2 million in legal fees to Munger, Tolles & Olson and $2.9 million to Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a pair of prominent Big Law firms that have long represented the company.

Snap also paid $130,000 last year to Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld for the firm to lobby on its behalf at the federal level on “issues related to online safety and privacy,” per public filings. The public strategies arm of Cozen O’Connor received a similar sum from Snap to advocate on healthcare matters.

Like other technology and social media companies, Snap has been buffeted by layoffs within the past two years. Snap announced Monday that it would shed 10% of its workforce, or around 540 employees.

In January, the company was unsuccessful in raising a liability shield to block a lawsuit accusing Snapchat of allegedly facilitating the sale of fentanyl-laced counterfeit drugs that killed eight of its users, some of them minors.

Family Ties

John Spiegel, a litigation partner at Munger Tolles, is the father of Snap co-founder and chief executive Evan Spiegel. The latter’s stepmother is Debra Wong Yang, a Gibson Dunn partner who chairs the firm’s crisis management practice and is a member of its executive committee. Both are based in Los Angeles.

Securities laws require that Snap disclose payments to outside firms that do a substantial amount of work for the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company and have stakeholders related to its senior executives. Munger Tolles has entered an appearance in nearly 20% of cases involving Snap in US federal courts within the past five years, according to Bloomberg Law data.

Snap, which went public in 2017, noted in a prospectus at the time that John Spiegel “has not personally provided any material legal services to us.”

O’Sullivan, 58, is a former Munger Tolles partner hired by Snap in 2017 to succeed the company’s first general counsel, Christopher Handman, who is now a co-founder of privacy platform TerraTrue Inc.

Securities filings show that within the past year O’Sullivan has sold off nearly $3.8 million in Snap stock. He still owns about $25.3 million in company shares, according to Bloomberg data.

The recent reduction in force has cut into the ranks of Snap’s in-house legal and compliance staff. The company did hire a new chief compliance officer in 2022 and last year Snap recruited Suzanne Nero and Paula Henin from King & Spalding and White & Case, respectively, for senior counsel roles.