“He’s a very unique combination of a spectacular lawyer
who can be brilliant and as tough as he needs to be,” says
Paul T. Cappuccio, general counsel at Time Warner and a
longtime mentor who helped hire Ullyot at Kirkland & Ellis.
“No one’s going to shake down Facebook.”
‘outed’ [CIA operative] Valerie Plame,
the guy who fired the U.S. attorneys that
happened a year-plus after I left the
department, among other allegations. …
I laughed because it was so preposterous.
The allegations were wildly inaccurate and
demonstrably false.”
Still, he called Facebook founder
Mark Zuckerberg and apologized for
causing such an uproar. “I told him I
stood by my experience and was proud
of what we accomplished collectively
as an administration and everything
I'd done in my career,” he says. “I was
apologizing because a general counsel
should be quieting things, not creating
new problems.”
Zuckerberg didn’t care about the
firestorm in the blogosphere. He suggested
Ullyot—on his first week on the job—join
him that Friday for his weekly Q&A in front
of Facebook employees, who could ask the
new general counsel anything they wanted.
“There were 600 employees at the time
and very few Republicans,” Ullyot says. “It
was a great way to be introduced and a
good discussion. It was cordial and funny
at times, and a tribute to Mark’s openness
and style.”
It was also a hint that Facebook was
going to be a very different kind of job
from his previous posts as partner at
Kirkland & Ellis in Washington, D.C., as
general counsel at AOL Time Warner, and
as general counsel at investment fund
ESL Investments Inc., based in Greenwich,
Conn.
Despite his lengthy resume, Ullyot is in
his mid-40s. He has boyish good looks, a
friendly manner and an articulate style of
speech. His standard office attire consists
of a blue sweater, a Brooks Brothers shirt,
jeans and wing tips, though it’s something
he eschewed shortly after arriving at
Facebook when he came to work one day
in a jersey of his favorite football team, the
Minnesota Vikings—which was unique even
for the informal tech company. “No one
had ever worn a football jersey to work,”
says Pedram Keyani, engineering manager
at Facebook. “I remember thinking, ‘He
doesn’t look like a general counsel.’ It was
cool to see.”
Ullyot, who competed on the varsity
cross-country team and the junior varsity
lacrosse team as an undergraduate at
Harvard University (class of 1990), also
joined the Facebook running team. “It’s a
good way to get to know people after-hours
and get them to see you as a reasonable
person and a normal person,” he says.
“Most normal people don’t want to hang
around lawyers, and engineers and other
Facebook employees are no exception.”
Ullyot knew the unique nature of
Facebook required him to gain the trust
of employees, especially the engineering
staff, and deeply integrate the legal
department into how the rest of the
company operated; those who know him
well say this inclusionary attitude is part of
his personality.
ULLYOT WAS RAISED IN SAN FRANCISCO,
where his parents were both physicians. He
had expected to follow them into medicine,
but a couple of events—volunteering for
the gubernatorial campaign of Bill Weld in
college and serving on a jury—convinced
him law was his calling. He would graduate
from the University of Chicago Law School
in 1994.
After clerking for Judge J. Michael Luttig
of the United States Court of Appeals for
the 4th Circuit (Luttig is now Boeing Co.'s
senior vice president and general counsel)
and then for Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia, Ullyot was recruited to Kirkland &
Ellis’ Washington, D.C., office by Cappuccio
and Kenneth Starr in 1996. “[Starr’s] advice
to me during the interview process was
to find a great firm, work hard, and make
that the home base for your career,” Ullyot
says. “Ken and Paul [Cappuccio] stepped
off to do public service, or go in-house, and
sometimes they go back to Kirkland.”
Stepping off and coming back to
Kirkland has been a pattern in Ullyot’s
career. Cappuccio recruited him to AOL
Time Warner in 2000, where Ullyot was
later appointed to senior vice president
and general counsel for AOL Time Warner
Europe. In 2002, Brett Kavanaugh, another
former Kirkland attorney who was then
working at the White House (and is now a
federal judge), suggested that he interview
for an open spot in the counsel’s office
at the White House under the George W.
Bush administration.
It was a job Ullyot enjoyed, working
for a man he admired. Serving in an
administration, Ullyot says, was something
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