Facebook has hired the former chief of staff to onetime U.S. Attorney Alberto Gonzales as its general counsel, according to the Los Angeles Times. Ted Ullyot, currently a Washington, D.C.-based partner for the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, will relocate to the Bay Area and join the Palo Alto social network next month.
He appears to have been hand-picked by Elliot Schrage, the former Google executive who joined Facebook as vice president of communications and public policy this spring, and Sheryl Sandberg, another Google alum who now serves as the company's chief operating officer.
Ullyot "has an extraordinary combination of private legal practice and public sector experience," Schrage told the Los Angeles Times. "So many of the legal issues we face touch on both of those arenas. He is equally comfortable helping us expand internationally as he is in helping us navigate complicated legal issues we may face in Washington. Ted's arrival really demonstrates we're a little more grown-up."
"Grown up" is a necessity for Facebook's image these days; founder Mark Zuckerberg is only 24, and after the public relations clusterbomb that was the "Beacon" advertising program, it was clear that some more seasoned executives had to be brought on board.
Ted Ullyot
(Credit: Kirkland & Ellis)Ullyot joins Facebook fewer than six months into his stint at Kirkland & Ellis, though he had been at the law firm from 1996 to 2002 before serving as general counsel for AOL Time Warner Europe out of the company's London office and then general counsel for the Greenwich, Conn.-based ESL Investments, the billion-dollar hedge fund founded by Edward Lampert.
Between 2003 and 2005, Ullyot occupied a number of positions in the federal government, including chief of staff of the Department of Justice and associate counsel to President George W. Bush. Most famously, he handled the federal government's response to the headline-grabbing Valerie Plame CIA leak.
"Ted has extremely strong connections with the Republican party, and we think that's a good thing," Schrage told the Times. COO Sandberg, on the other hand, has political experience from the other side of the aisle: she served as chief of staff to former President Bill Clinton's Department of the Treasury.
Like many of Facebook's top executives, Ullyot attended Harvard University, where the social network was birthed in Zuckerberg's dorm room in 2004. Ullyot obtained his undergraduate degree from the elite college in 1989, two years ahead of Sandberg; an old Harvard Crimson article hints that he competed on the cross-country team. In addition to Sandberg and Zuckerberg (who dropped out to work on Facebook full-time), Schrage is also a Harvard graduate--he obtained his law degree there.
Some of Facebook's most famous legal problems have their roots at Harvard, too. The founders of ConnectU, the would-be social network that only recently settled a years-old intellectual property suit against Zuckerberg, were members of the class of 2004.
Another prominent Google employee has jumped ship to Facebook.
Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications and public affairs at Google, has been hired in a similar role at the fast-growing social network, reports Kara Swisher of All Things Digital.
Schrage's role at both companies, founded in a legal rather than marketing background, involves dealing with D.C. lobbyists and policymakers in addition to the press. His move to Facebook follows Sheryl Sandberg, who became chief operating officer at Facebook after a stint as vice president of global sales at Google. Schrage will report to Sandberg, Swisher writes, but he inquired about the role at Facebook directly through founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg rather than Sandberg.
Elliot Schrage
(Credit: Google)Swisher posted an internal e-mail from Zuckerberg to employees. The young CEO explained that Schrage "will be responsible for developing the key messages we want people to understand about our products, our business and the growing global importance of social networking and what we do...Elliot will direct our efforts to work with users, media, governments and other entities around the world to ensure that Facebook's policies are transparent, responsive, effective and are recognized as being those things."
Facebook representatives were not immediately available to comment or provide a public statement.
The news was originally hinted at by gossip blog Valleywag, which said earlier this week that Schrage was interviewing for the Facebook post and speculated that it had to do with his opposition to some tawdry goings-on at Google's top ranks. But as headhunting firm Binc recently found, Google employees tend to leave the company for a variety of concrete reasons, not the least of which is the fact that corporate culture has made Mountain View less of the revolution and more of The Man.
Aside from Sandberg, Facebook already employs a number of other ex-Googlers such as Ethan Beard, former director of social media; Benjamin Ling, former head of Google Checkout; and YouTube's Gideon Yu, who made the jump to Facebook shortly after Google acquired the video-sharing site.
Several other high-ranking Googlers have left for non-Facebook (and even non-Valley) destinations, like Chief Information Officer Doug Merrill, who left the company for a job at music label EMI.
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