According to Business Insider, Apple has hired Meta’s chief legal officer, Jennifer Newstead, as its next general counsel. She will join Apple as a senior vice president in January 2025, reporting to CEO Tim Cook, and is set to officially become general counsel on March 1, 2026, succeeding Kate Adams who plans to retire late next year. In the same announcement, Apple said its vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, Lisa Jackson, will retire in January 2026, with her Government Affairs team eventually moving under Newstead. Newstead’s departure from Meta comes just weeks after she oversaw the company’s historic win against the FTC in a major antitrust trial. Her move follows Meta’s own poaching of Apple’s longtime human interface design chief, Alan Dye, earlier this week.
The stakes for Apple’s legal future
This isn’t just a routine executive change. It’s a massive hire for Apple at a critical time. Think about it: Apple is in the regulatory crosshairs globally, facing antitrust scrutiny in the US and Europe, battles over app store rules, and constant pressure on privacy and data transfers. They just brought in the lawyer who successfully defended Meta against the FTC’s attempt to break up Instagram and WhatsApp. That’s a very specific, high-stakes skill set.
Newstead isn’t just a corporate lawyer. She’s been in the trenches of the biggest tech policy fights of the last decade. Her experience navigating the EU’s Digital Markets Act and tricky cross-border data issues at Meta is directly transferable to Apple’s most pressing headaches. Basically, Apple just hired a general who’s been winning battles on a very similar battlefield.
A strange executive dance
Here’s the thing that makes this extra spicy: the timing. Meta literally just hired Apple’s chief design officer, Alan Dye, a few days ago. Now Apple fires back by taking Meta’s top lawyer. It feels less like coincidence and more like a quiet, high-stakes talent swap between two giants who are supposedly rivals but operate in the same elite Silicon Valley ecosystem.
But the impact is asymmetric. Losing a design lead is significant, but Apple’s design philosophy is deeply institutionalized. Losing your chief legal officer right after a landmark win? That’s a brain drain of institutional knowledge on active, ongoing legal wars. Meta’s legal team will have to regroup quickly, especially with so many regulatory fights still pending.
What the memo reveals
The internal memo, which you can read via Business Insider, is classic corporate farewell stuff, but between the lines, it’s all about credibility. Newstead highlights the FTC win and building a “compliance culture” – that’s her resume for Tim Cook right there. She also frames the move to Apple as a “unique opportunity” to continue shaping global legal and policy issues. Translation: she’s not retiring; she’s moving to an even bigger platform.
For users and developers, this likely means continuity in Apple’s famously aggressive and principled legal defense. Don’t expect Apple to suddenly soften its stance on App Store fees or privacy. If anything, they’ve just doubled down by bringing in a proven fighter from a company that knows how to push back against regulators. The legal trenches around the world just got more interesting.
