Google Owner Doles Out More Than $30 Million to Legal Chief

Alphabet Inc. disclosed in a proxy filing late Friday that its top lawyer J. Kent Walker Jr. received almost $30.2 million in total compensation last year.

Walker, who has spent nearly two decades handling a variety of legal and regulatory matters for the California-based parent of Google, garnered more than $27.1 million of his payout through stock awards. Walker previously earned pay packages valued at $27.3 million in 2023, $24.4 million in 2022, and $50.9 million in 2021, his first full year running Alphabet’s legal show.

Within the past few years Walker has taken a leading role in Alphabet’s effort to push back against the US government’s bid to break up its Google unit, which prosecutors claim has monopolized the online search market. Walker wrote in a company blog post last year that the Justice Department “chose to push a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership.”

Alphabet’s most recent filing shows that Walker was also paid more than $3 million in cash last year, including roughly $1 million in base salary. Walker, in addition to his legal duties, also serves as Alphabet’s corporate secretary and president of global affairs. He took on more responsibility in 2020 following the retirement of Alphabet’s longtime top lawyer David Drummond.

Walker first joined Google—the company adopted Alphabet as the name of its parent company in 2015—as its general counsel in 2006 after working at eBay Inc. He spent nearly a dozen years as general counsel before relinquishing that role in 2018. The job sat vacant for two years until Alphabet elevated another company legal veteran, Halimah DeLaine Prado, to fill that position.

Alphabet’s Google has made other changes to its in-house legal team in recent years, such as bringing on Cassandra “Sandi” Knight to oversee parts of the company’s massive litigation docket. Google promoted Makesha Patterson last year to head of general litigation.

Google was also one of several big companies to eliminate its chief privacy officer role, with Keith Enright leaving last year to become co-chair of the technology and innovation industry group at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Another legal giant, Freshfields, also recruited Google’s former director of competition legal Kevin Yingling as a partner.