Blue Owl’s Legal Chief Surges to Top-Paid Among Asset Managers

Blue Owl Capital Inc. gave more than $24.4 million last year to its chief legal officer and general counsel Neena Reddy, bringing a relatively new name into the elite total compensation tier of asset management lawyers.

Reddy, a member of Blue Owl’s executive and operating committees, earned more than her peers at prominent publicly traded companies in the broader financial services and investment space, including those at Apollo Global Management Inc., Blackstone Inc., and The Carlyle Group Inc.

The bulk of Reddy’s remuneration for fiscal 2024, which was disclosed by Blue Owl in a proxy statement filed April 25, was almost entirely comprised of roughly $20.6 million in stock awards that will partially vest between 2026 and 2029. The US Securities and Exchange Commission requires that long-term equity awards be included in the year they are awarded to an executive, not when they are achieved or realized, which can create a somewhat skewed understanding of what a lawyer has been “paid” in any given year.

Equity grants are often tied to certain performance targets or other metrics, which if not met can lead to compensation adjustments in future years. Nonetheless, such large awards provide a benchmark for gauging an individual legal executive’s importance to their employer’s C-suite, as well as a means of ranking law department leaders against their peers through the prism of what they stand to earn in future years.

Reddy, who also serves as Blue Owl’s corporate secretary, is listed as the company’s third highest-paid executive in 2024. Blue Owl’s co-CEOs Douglas Ostrover and Marc Lipschultz determined her compensation last year, which included $350,000 in base salary and a nearly $3.5 million bonus, putting her cash compensation at roughly $3.8 million, according to its proxy statement. Blue Owl notes in the filing that it doesn’t engage a compensation consultant or “formally benchmark” executive pay to a specific peer group.

The document reveals that Reddy realized almost $2.1 million in stock vesting from Blue Owl last year, giving her “take home” total compensation of more than $5.9 million in 2024, including cash and stock. Reddy joined Blue Owl predecessor Owl Rock Capital as its general counsel in 2019, having spent the prior decade in-house at The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. She previously worked in private practice at Boies Schiller Flexner and Debevoise & Plimpton.

More Big Money Makers

Reddy didn’t respond to a request for comment about her compensation. Blue Owl declined to discuss the matter. The New York-based company is an alternative asset manager focused on private credit, general partner stakes, and real assets. Blue Owl doesn’t have a private equity business.

As a means of comparison, a 10-K filing by Blackstone earlier this year showed that its longtime top lawyer, John Finley, received nearly $17.2 million in total compensation during 2024. Carlyle’s global general counsel, Jeffrey Ferguson, earned almost $6.1 million in total compensation last year, according to a proxy statement filed in April. Ferguson’s pay package included more than $4.6 million in stock, while Finley’s was weighted with almost $11.4 million in stock awards.

Apollo disclosed in a proxy statement filed the same day as Blue Owl’s that its new legal chief Whitney Chatterjee received almost $2.8 million in total compensation last year. The pay package for the former Sullivan & Cromwell partner, who took over last year from Apollo’s longtime legal leader John Suydam, didn’t include any long-term equity awards. Chatterjee did, however, realize more than $5 million last year from the vesting of previously awarded Apollo shares, according to the company.

Apollo’s filing also noted that it paid almost $631,800 last year to its former board chair, Walter “Jay” Clayton III, a retired Sullivan & Cromwell partner who resigned from the company last month to return to public service as the Trump administration’s top federal prosecutor in New York. Clayton, who returned to Sullivan & Cromwell as a senior policy adviser and of counsel after leading the SEC during the first Trump administration, will keep his Apollo stock.

Other lawyers in the publicly traded asset management space, such as TPG Inc.’s newly hired general counsel Jennifer Chu and KKR & Co. Inc.’s relatively new legal leader Kathryn King Sudol, didn’t make their company’s respective summary compensation tables for 2024.

Nor did Ares Management Corp.’s Naseem Sagati Aghili; BlackRock Inc.'s Christopher Meade; Charles Schwab Corp.'s Peter Morgan III; Invesco Ltd.'s Jeffrey Kupor; Northern Trust Corp.'s Susan Levy; Prudential Financial Inc.’s Ann Kappler; or T. Rowe Price Group Inc.'s David Oestreicher. Anne Robinson, the former top lawyer at privately held investment manager Vanguard Group Inc., earned nearly $10 million last year after joining International Business Machines Corp.