“AT&T Inc.’s top lawyer David McAtee made nearly double the compensation in 2020 he did the previous year, due to an equity award infusion,” reports Ruiqi Chen in Bloomberg Law’s Business & Practice.

“McAtee made over $18.6 million in 2020 as the Dallas-based telecom giant’s general counsel and senior executive vice president, compared to $9.4 million in 2019, according to a Thursday SEC filing.”

“The increase comes from a ‘career retention grant’ in the form of an additional $9 million in stock awards over what he received in 2019, on top of his base salary of $1.3 million. The grant does not vest until 2030.”

Read the article.

Image by Elliott Brown

Before the top corporate lawyer at Uber Technologies departed last year, she sought a $100 million exit package, reports Business Insider.

Salle Yoo joined Uber as its first general counsel in 2012 and was later promoted to be its chief legal officer, leading the company’s 290-person legal department during a tumultuous time. She resigned in September 2017.

Reporter Julie Bort explains: “Yoo thought [the exit package request] only fair because she had seen male executives ask for and get huge exit packages, and she had spent her career at Uber encouraging women to lean in. So she took her own advice, opened her negotiations with [former CEO Travis] Kalanick by shooting high, and held her breath.”

She and Kalanick negotiated a compromise: less than two-thirds her original demand, but with a kicker: If Uber gave a better severance deal to another employee, it had to match the difference for Yoo.

Read the Business Insider article.

MarketWatch is reporting that General Electric Co. Chief Executive John Flannery and other top company executives received no bonuses in 2017, but the $9 million Flannery was awarded in his first year as CEO still managed to be 157 times higher than the salary of the company’s median employee.

Claudia Assis reports that GE said in a filing that Flannery’s salary was set at $2 million, plus stock options, pension and deferred compensation and other monies that took his total pay package to $9 million for the year.

“For 2017, the Compensation Committee determined that, for the first time in GE’s history, the senior leaders at GE’s headquarters — our past and present CEOs, CFOs, Vice Chairs, General Counsel and HR directors — would not receive bonuses,” the company said in its annual proxy filing. “We also zeroed out the performance share units awarded to senior leaders in 2015 even though the recipients were technically eligible for a partial payout.”

Read the MarketWatch article.