Meta Hires Litigation Strategy Chief, Tapping King & Spalding Partner Who Was Senior DOJ Official in First Trump Term

Ethan Davis, a senior Department of Justice official during Donald Trump’s first presidential administration, is stepping down as a King & Spalding partner to become head of global litigation strategy for Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

Davis is coming aboard as a Federal Trade Commission antitrust lawsuit looms large over Meta’s future. The suit—brought by the agency in December 2020, a month before the end of Donald Trump’s first presidential term—alleges Meta monopolized the social media market by buying Instagram and WhatsApp and then using anticompetitive practices to thwart rivals.

James Boasberg, chief judge for the District of Columbia, will preside over a bench trial that begins April 14. Meta denies doing anything improper and says the two purchases have been good for competition and consumers. But if the company loses, one option for Boasberg would be to order Meta to divest Instagram and WhatsApp.

Meta confirmed Davis’ hiring, which was first reported by Reuters. Davis did not immediately respond to a message from Law.com.

Since October 2020, Davis has been a San Francisco-based litigation partner for King & Spalding, which ranks 17th on the Am Law 100 and has more than 1,100 attorneys.

The Yale Law School graduate started his legal career at the DOJ, serving as a trial attorney from 2013 until 2017. He then jumped to King & Spalding, where over the course of four years he argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court and rose to partner.

He then rejoined the DOJ to serve as deputy assistant attorney general for the Consumer Protection Branch. After a year, he stepped away for a yea-long clerkship with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, then returned to the agency to serve as principal deputy assistant attorney general of the Civil Division and then acting assistant attorney general of the Civil Division.

Davis’ hiring adds to already deep government expertise in Meta’s legal department, which in recent years has had in the ballpark of 2,000 employees.

At the helm of the department is Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Newstead, who joined the company in 2019 from the U.S. State Department, where she was its top lawyer.

A 1994 graduate of Yale Law School, Newstead started her career at Davis Polk & Wardwell and then spent nearly two decades in federal posts—working at the Office of Management and Budget, the DOJ and as an associate White House counsel.

Davis’ appointment comes on the heels of Meta revamping its global policy team. Semafor reported on Jan. 2 that President Nick Clegg had stepped down and was being replaced by Joel Kaplan, his deputy and the company’s most prominent Republican.

Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister and ex-leader of the country’s Liberal Democrats, had been Meta’s policy and lobbying chief since joining the company in 2018.

According to Semafor, Kaplan, who was deputy chief of staff under President George W. Bush, had forcefully argued within Meta against Facebook’s restrictions on political speech, saying they disproportionately muted conservatives.

On Tuesday, Meta pulled back from those restrictions, saying it was ending a fact-checking program the company launched nine years ago to curtail the spread of misinformation.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the change via a video in which he declared “it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression” and said the fact-checking system had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

In a Jan. 2 LinkedIn post Clegg wrote fondly of his Meta tenure but said that “as a new year begins, I have come to the view that this is the right time for me to move on.”

Clegg wrote that he was thrilled Kaplan was his successor, calling him “quite clearly the right person for the right job at the right time!”