Legal at Apple Scale
Establishing a billion dollar search engine deal with Google took Apple more than four months, according to new details shared today by former Apple lawyer Bruce Sewell.
[…]
Sewell says that in his time at Apple, he had 900 people working under him. 600 of those were in the law group and included lawyers and paralegals.
In just one of the Samsung lawsuits, Apple had 350 people billing time on that case at any given moment, most of which were outside counsel because it’s impossible for Apple to handle cases of that magnitude with an internal team. “And this was just one of them. There were seven of them going on,” said Sewell.
There were seven or eight billion documents to review, and collectively, law firms billed Apple 280,000 hours. Sewell says his budget was “just shy of a billion dollars a year.”
I wonder whether Apple is looking at ways to protect the privacy of the customers it’s sending to Google search. Right now, services revenue seems to trump privacy.
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I think this is not only a question of revenue vs privacy, but more a user expectation vs privacy.
While Apple took the risk to favor privacy over convenience when switching to Map, we all now how hard it was.
Changing the default search engine from Google that everybody knows, and almost everybody think is better to something else will inevitably result in a lot of users complaining the decision.
How, and by the way, all the work done with Safari and ITP is done to protect privacy of customers send to Google search.
@Jean-Daniel True, but those aren’t the two options. They could make Google searches private, like Startpage does.
