Top Apple Lawyer Sees Slight Pay Boost as Legal Docket Grows

Apple Inc. general counsel Katherine Adams received a $27.1 million pay package during fiscal 2022, a slight increase from the year prior, as the company coped with a growing litigation docket.

Adams received $5 million in cash, including $1 million in salary, and $22.1 million in stock awards, Apple disclosed in an annual proxy filing Thursday. She received nearly $27 million in 2021.

The issues Apple is currently wrestling with include lawsuits, a unionization effort in stores, a hiring slowdown, and a pushback over return-to-office protocols.

Apple hired Adams, a former top lawyer at Honeywell International Inc., to succeed the retiring D. Bruce Sewell as its law department leader in 2017. She is perennially one of the highest-paid legal chiefs among US publicly traded companies.

She received $26 million in compensation in 2020 and $25 million in 2019.

Last year Adams oversaw a reorganization of Apple’s in-house legal team, according to memoranda obtained by Bloomberg. The reshuffling created two new groups—product and regulatory, and corporate, commercial, and compliance—within the Cupertino, Calif.-based company’s legal function.

Apple named a new vice president of legal last October in Heather Grenier, a former partner at the law firm Morrison & Foerster who recently was a senior director at the company overseeing commercial litigation and legal operations.

An Apple spokesman declined to discuss personnel matters.

The changes occurred after the departure in late 2021 of Apple’s former chief litigation counsel, Noreen Krall, as well as the death in February 2022 of Douglas Vetter, a longtime associate general counsel at the company.

Krall, a co-founder of ChIPs Network Inc., a nonprofit women’s technology law group, spent a dozen years at Apple. Her former job was eliminated in legal’s restructuring.

Apple also saw its former head of corporate law, Gene Levoff, plead guilty last summer to insider trading charges. The company was sued in December by Jayna Richardson Whitt, an intellectual property lawyer who claims she was fired by Apple last year for complaining about abuse by a male colleague.

Compliance, Privacy Changes

Apple’s corporate, commercial, and compliance group is now led by Kyle Andeer, another longtime in-house lawyer at the company who most recently served as Apple’s chief compliance officer and head of corporate law. Andeer’s portfolio now includes anti-money laundering, competition, and privacy.

Andeer, who joined Apple in 2010 as the company’s first antitrust lawyer, was named vice president of products and regulatory law in May 2022. Apple tapped Andeer to testify at a key US Senate antitrust hearing in 2021 about its app store policies.

Heba Hamouda, a former director of commercial law who has worked at Apple since 2011, was promoted to succeed Andeer as the company’s compliance chief.

Bruce “B.J.” Watrous Jr., another veteran Apple lawyer and former chief commercial counsel and global head of security at the company, is now vice president of its corporate, commercial, and compliance legal group. Apple initially hired Watrous in 2011 to be its top IP lawyer.

Jane Horvath, a former senior director of global privacy at Apple who took on the role of chief privacy officer in 2021, is leaving the company this month to return to private practice. Bloomberg first reported last year that Horvath would become a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which announced her hire Jan. 9.

Horvath reunites with Vivek Mohan, another former Apple privacy and cybersecurity lawyer who joined Gibson Dunn last year as co-chair of the firm’s artificial intelligence and automated systems practice.

Gibson Dunn and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison represented Apple in a long-running antitrust dispute with Epic Games Inc. Apple prevailed in that fight despite ongoing challenges to its app store.

More Legal Promotions

Two other Apple in-house lawyers—Robert Windom and Susanne Geraghty—are now running the company’s content and services law and commercial and international law teams, respectively.

Alexander Caminas was promoted in October to senior director of products law, a role that saw him take over the company’s software law function from Joyce Chow, who retired the following month after three decades at Apple.

Colette Reiner Mayer, another former Morrison & Foerster partner hired by Apple in late 2021 as its head of IP litigation, now reports to the company’s chief IP counsel Jeffrey Myers. Morrison & Foerster has been a popular target for Apple’s recruiters.

Heather Mewes, a former Fenwick & West partner who has spent the past decade at Apple, was elevated last May to head of licensing and IP transactions.

Mewes took over a role vacated that same month by former IP transactions head Sarita Venkat, who left Apple to become a deputy general counsel for global litigation at Cisco Systems 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-related disputes comprised roughly 40% of Apple’s caseload in US federal courts since 2007, according to Bloomberg Law data. Apple employs a large roster of law firms—from Big Law giants to regional specialists—to serve its outside counsel needs in legal battles across various jurisdictions.

Looking Forward

An online jobs page shows that Apple is looking to hire for more than a dozen positions within its legal team. The company has brought on more than 20 lawyers from Big Law within the past year, according to Bloomberg Law data.

Some of those new recruits were made to offset exits, including that of Kathryn “Katie” Tague, a three-year veteran of Apple’s media content and services team.

Tague left the company last May to become general counsel for the XQ Institute, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit backed by Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

A spokeswoman for XQ, which is focused on innovation in education, confirmed Tague took over in May from former in-house lawyers Edward Garey and Mark Miller.