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Snapchat has hired a new general counsel, the company confirmed to Re/code on Thursday.
The new hire, Christopher Handman, comes from Hogan Lovells, where he was a partner in the multinational firm’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. Much of Handman’s experience was in leading Hogan Lovells’s appellate practice, having worked alongside now-U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts.
The appointment comes at a time when the young startup has shown signs of eventually maturing into a larger company. Snapchat raised a Series C round of venture funding late last year, months after rebuffing multi-billion-dollar acquisition offers from Facebook. With the $50 million raised in December, Snapchat has raised upward of $120 million to date.
There have also been recent rumors circulating that Snapchat is considering raising another venture round of funding in the near future. A Snapchat spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on the company’s potential fundraising efforts.
Snapchat has also started to grow as a product, introducing new features like “Stories” and a text and video chat option.
Aside from Handman, Snapchat has begun hiring for more high-level positions in the company, a departure from its lean startup days when it was just a handful of engineers.
Most notably, Snapchat poached business lead Emily White away from Instagram last year to be its new chief operating officer, where she’ll be in charge of turning Snapchat into an actual business. Phillipe Browning, a former CBS executive, will be supporting White as VP of monetization.
As we’ve noted in the past, Snapchat is still considering hiring talented sales people as it thinks through different models of making money, which could include app discovery, advertising or working with partners in the media industry.
Snapchat also said on Thursday it had hired Jad Boutros, a former Google engineer who spent the past decade working on security for the company. Most recently, Boutros worked on security efforts for the company’s Google+ social product. It is likely an attempt to defend against future security gaffes, like the ones that plagued Snapchat for weeks last year.
New general counsel Handman has relocated from Washington, D.C., to Snapchat’s Venice Beach headquarters in Southern California. He began his first day at work this morning.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
