This past Friday, Apple announced that Katherine "Kate" Adams will be the next general counsel of Apple. Specifically, she is the general counsel and senior vice president of Legal and Global Security, reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Here is some background on the general counsel position at Apple and Ms. Adams.
The general counsel position at Apple over the last 20 years
After almost dying as a company, Apple purchased NeXT in March of 1996 and brought Steve Jobs back to the company. Eighteen months later, Apple hired Nancy Heinen to serve as General Counsel and Secretary, a job Heinen had also held at NeXT. Heinen held the position until May of 2006, when she resigned shortly before Apple admitted to some irregularities in the backdating of stock options. Heinen eventually settled claims brought by the SEC for about $2.2 million, without admitting to any of the SEC's charges.
It took Apple six months to replace Heinen, and the next two replacements did not last as long as Heinen. First, Apple hired Donald Rosenberg in November of 2007. Rosenberg had previously been general counsel at IBM, where he had worked for over 30 years. But Rosenberg did not stay at Apple very long, leaving after only 10 months to become general counsel at Qualcomm, a position that he still holds today. Today, Apple and Qualcomm have more than Rosenberg in common; they are also suing each other in huge litigation over Qualcomm's cellphone patents. A few days ago, Max Chafkin and Ian King of Bloomberg Businessweek wrote an article about this litigation called Apple and Qualcomm's Billion-Dollar War Over an $18 Part.
In September of 2007, Apple replaced Rosenberg with Daniel Cooperman. Cooperman had previously served as General Counsel for Oracle for 11 years and before that was a partner in the San Francisco office of the firm that eventually became Bingham McCutchen. Cooperman stayed at Apple for only two years, and then he returned to Bingham McCutchen. When that firm collapsed in 2014, he moved on to DLA Piper, and now teaches at Stanford Law School and advises an angel investor.
In September of 2009, Apple hired D. Bruce Sewell, the fourth and final general counsel hired during the second tenure of Steve Jobs at Apple. Before coming to Apple, Sewell had served as Intel's general counsel for 15 years. During the eight years that Sewell has lead the legal department at Apple, Apple become the largest company in the world thanks to the iPhone. Sewell oversaw numerous complex legal issues including litigation with Samsung for copying the iPhone, efforts to return a prototype iPhone 4 that an Apple employee left in a bar, and numerous consumer privacy issues including negotiations with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies around the world eager to access confidential information on iPhones.
Sewell announced last week that he will be retiring from the Apple at the end of 2017. "To have worked with this amazing executive team and all the incredibly smart people at Apple, especially my colleagues in legal and global security, has been the honor of a lifetime," said Bruce Sewell in Apple's press release. "The years I have spent in this job have been the most gratifying of my career. I’m delighted Kate is joining and I know she will be a huge asset."
Kate Adams
Adams grew up in New York, and thanks to her father John Adams, had lots of early exposure to the law. John Adams worked as a Wall Street attorney and then a federal prosecutor, but is best known for co-founding the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1970, the nation's first litigation-focused environmental advocacy group. Under the leadership of John Adams, the NRDC was involved in some of most important environmental litigation in the 1970s and beyond.
Kate Adams went to college at Brown University, where she graduated in 1986 when a B.A. in Comparative Literature with French and German concentrations. She thought about becoming a professor of literature, but got a job after college working in the criminal justice system, and this made her decide to be a lawyer. She explained in one interview: "I got a job right out of college [at Brown University] in the Bronx criminal court system working with repeat offenders. I was exposed to lawyers and working in the justice system and got really interested in that whole arena of the intersection between law and society. I thought, 'Maybe I should do this. It’s not a professor of literature, but I will do a lot of writing.'"
Adams then went to law school at the University of Chicago Law School, where she graduated in 1990. After law school, she clerked for Stephen Breyer, who was then the Chief Judge of the First Circuit, but would be appointed to the Supreme Court by President Clinton in 1994. From 1991 to 1993, she worked as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, working on environmental law. From 1993 to 1994, she worked as a law clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor at the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 1994, Adams joined the New York office of the Sidley Austin law firm, where she had an environmental law and litigation practice for almost ten years. She made partner at Sidley in the late 1990s, and also taught environmental law as an adjunct professor at Columbia and NYU.
In 2003, Adams left private practice to work as Deputy General Counsel at Honeywell. In 2009, she was named general counsel at Honeywell. She worked to improve Honeywell's safety and environmental record, and reduced Honeywell's new case filing rate through litigation prevention measures.
After working at Honeywell for 14 years, eight of those years as general counsel, Kate Adams is now the first general counsel hired in the post-Steve Jobs era of Apple. Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a press release: "We are thrilled to welcome Kate to our team. She’s a seasoned leader with outstanding judgment and that has worked on a wide variety of legal cases globally. Throughout her career she’s also been an advocate on many of the values we at Apple hold dear." Adams is quoted as saying: "Apple has had a tremendous impact on the world and it's an honor to join their team. I’m excited to help Apple continue to grow and evolve around the world, protecting their ideas and IP, and defending our shared values."
Kate Adams seems to have the perfect background for this position. She is incredibly smart, has experience as a general counsel, has a lot of experience with patents and other technology issues thanks to her time at Honeywell, and she grew up with a deep appreciation for protecting the environment and other values that are critical to Tim Cook's Apple. Good luck to the entire legal department at Apple during this transition, and I hope that Adams has a long and successful tenure.
UPDATE 12/8/2017: Today, Apple updated its Apple Leadership page to replace Sewell with Adams. Here is what Apple says about Adams:
Kate Adams is Apple’s general counsel and senior vice president of Legal and Global Security, reporting to CEO Tim Cook. Kate serves on the company’s executive team and oversees all legal matters, including corporate governance, intellectual property, litigation and securities compliance, global security and privacy. Kate joined Apple from Honeywell in 2017, where she worked for 14 years, most recently as senior vice president and general counsel. At Honeywell, Kate was in charge of the organization’s global legal strategy across more than 100 countries.
Prior to joining Honeywell, Kate was a partner at Sidley Austin LLP in New York. Earlier in her career, she served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor; as trial attorney for the United States Department of Justice, Appellate Section, Environment and Natural Resources division; and as law clerk for Stephen Breyer, then chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
Kate earned a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature from Brown University and a law degree from the University of Chicago Law School.