Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr (WilmerHale) charged Meta Platforms Inc., Facebook’s parent company, almost $75 million last year. The figure represents a 12% rise and reflects litigation handled by the law firm revolving around Covid-19 vaccine disinformation and data harvesting. This disclosure provides a unique insight into how much a single top-tier law firm can receive from one of the largest social media platforms in the world. Robert Kimmitt, a senior international counsel at WilmerHale, who has been a lead director on Meta’s board since 2020, is the reason for the public disclosure of these figures.
Last year’s earnings from Meta accounted for a substantial 5% of WilmerHale’s total revenue, a fact uncovered in the director independence section of a March 29 preliminary proxy filing. In 2023, the firm’s revenue reached close to $1.5 billion, as announced last month.
Kimmitt, a former US diplomat and key figure in the Treasury under President George W Bush, has joined a number of lawyers from larger firms finding their services in demand by US public firms. In his role as Meta director, Kimmitt received $674,300 in total compensation last year, as revealed by the company based in Menlo Park, California. WilmerHale received around $67 million from the Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta in 2022 and a roughly similar sum the year prior, according to securities filings.