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Facebook GC Announces Plan to Leave

By George Khoury, Esq. on July 27, 2018 | Last updated on March 21, 2019

The general counsel at Facebook, Colin Stretch, in a public post on the platform, recently announced that he will be leaving his position by the end of the year.

Stretch has been with Facebook since 2010, and endured through several trips to D.C. for investigations, and even the recent Cambridge Analytical scandal. However, his family relocated out of Silicon Valley to the East Coast, and he realized that his not being close by was doing the company a disservice.

New GC to the Rescue

While Recode is reporting that the company will look to hire from the outside, they also believe that the company's current deputy GC, Paul Grewal, could get tapped for a promotion. Grewal, after all, was a federal magistrate judge before joining the tech giant, and has been with Facebook for about two years now.

Regardless, whoever does fill the roll, will likely need to learn how to navigate the high profile legal trouble that Facebook seems to land in. Luckily, it is anticipated that Stretch will still be on board to help on-board the new GC.

For the social media giant, the role of General Counsel for the legal department, as Stretch explains, "needs [to provide] sustained leadership." The company seems to face lawsuits left and right.

Whether it's related to biometric face scanning, or racially discriminatory advertising, Facebook is rarely not in the news thanks to some legal drama related to how it used technology. For the company's lawyers, all the legal drama likely requires quite a bit of coordination, which despite how easy Facebook makes it to connect with others, is sounds like the company's legal team likely needs some actual face-time together.

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