Apple Hires Lobbying Firm WilmerHale To Focus On Intellectual Property Issues

wilmerhale

According to a report from PC World, Apple has hired Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, a law firm that represented the Cupertino-based company in many patent cases against Samsung.

The law firm will reportedly serve as the company’s lobbyists in Washington. The report notes that they will help Apple with matters regarding intellectual property and competition in the technology industry.

Apple is one of the largest IT industry lobbyists in the world and in the first nine month of this year they spent $3 million on lobbying efforts including consumer health and medical devices. In comparison, Google has already spent $13 million this year making it the largest IT lobbyist.

“The specific issues that WilmerHale will lobby on were not disclosed, but a clue can sometimes be found in the personal experience of the individual lobbyists. They are David Ross, who was an international trade counsel at the Senate Finance Committee for four years until 2011 and worked at the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Neil Potts, who before joining WilmerHale in 2013 was an attorney at a company specializing in international and trade law, and Jonathan Yarowsky, who worked alongside Potts at his previous firm and is now a WilmerHale partner in regulatory and government affairs.”

Apple now has a large group of lobbyists on its team, including six firms (with the latest addition of WilmerHale) and multiple in-house lawyers. It is still unclear what specific issues the lobbyists from WilmerHale will take on, however, given the firm’s areas of focus in the past it appears that they will focus on issues regarding patent policy and government affairs.

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