WilmerHale Grew Meta Platforms’ Legal Bills by 12% Last Year

Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr billed Meta Platforms Inc. almost $75 million last year, a 12% increase, as the law firm handled litigation over Covid-19 vaccine disinformation and data harvesting.

The disclosure provides a rare window into how much a single Big Law shop collects from one of the largest social media platforms. The Facebook parent discloses the fees only because Robert Kimmitt, a senior international counsel at WilmerHale, has served on its board as lead director since 2020.

The fees that WilmerHale received from Meta last year amounted to 5% of the firm’s total revenue, the company disclosed in the director independence section of a March 29 preliminary proxy filing. WilmerHale’s revenue reached nearly $1.5 billion in 2023, the firm announced last month.

Kimmitt, 76, a former US ambassador to Germany in the early 1990s who also served as a deputy and acting secretary of the Treasury Department under President George W. Bush, is one of several lawyers from large firms that have found their services in demand by US public companies.

Meta, WilmerHale, and Kimmitt didn’t respond to requests for comment. Kimmitt received $674,300 in total compensation last year in his role as a Meta director, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company disclosed.

WilmerHale received about $67 million from Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta in 2022 and a roughly similar sum the year prior, according to securities filings.

Litigators from WilmerHale had a role in almost 3% of cases involving Meta in US federal courts within the last five years, Bloomberg Law data shows.

WilmerHale worked with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in representing Meta in litigation with the District of Columbia over Covid-19 vaccine disinformation. The firm also advised Meta in a dispute with Bright Data Ltd., an Israeli outfit accused of harvesting information from Facebook and Instagram profiles. Meta dropped its lawsuit against Bright Data in February after a setback in that case.

Disclosure Rules

Securities rules generally require public companies to disclose relationships with the employers of directors to ameliorate any shareholder concerns about potential conflicts of interest.

Blackstone Inc. paid Kirkland & Ellis $41.6 million in 2023, the company disclosed this year. The financial giant made the disclosure because Reginald Brown, an ex-WilmerHale partner who moved to Kirkland in 2020, had joined its board.

WilmerHale’s represented Zuckerberg in testimony before Congress and did so again earlier this year with lawyers from Kirkland when Meta’s co-founder and chief executive appeared at a US Senate hearing on protecting children online.

Kimmitt is not a WilmerHale partner and is thus not compensated from any fees the firm receives from the company, Meta said in its filing. He hasn’t provided legal services to Meta during his term as a director and only “provided de minimis legal services” in the three years before he joined the board.

Meta in 2019 recruited Jennifer Newstead, a former US Supreme Court clerk and ex-partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell, to succeed Colin Stretch as the top lawyer for what was then called Facebook. Meta’s most recent proxy doesn’t list Newstead, 54, among its five highest-paid executives in 2023.

Newstead owns nearly $19.5 million in Meta stock, per Bloomberg data. She earned some of those shares as an incentive award when Newstead was hired.

Meta’s legal chief sold off more than $3.3 million in company stock during the first quarter of 2024, according to securities filings. Newstead also unloaded more than $8 million in Meta shares last year.