Hossein Nowbar waged antitrust battles and created new legal policies around AI for Redmond
ServiceNow has hired Hossein Nowbar as its chief legal officer and president, the company announced on Monday.
Nowbar spent 28 years at Microsoft, where he was most recently chief legal officer, and oversaw complex M&A deals like the company’s $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard as well as the dawn of Microsoft’s involvement with AI.
Somewhat unusually for a former employer, Microsoft President Brad Smith had no objection to the move, and in fact heaped praise on Nowbar and congratulated ServiceNow in a statement that accompanied the announcement. “Having worked closely with Hossein for more than 25 years, I can say first-hand that ServiceNow is incredibly fortunate to have him,” Smith enthused.
Nowbar and Smith cowrote a blog in 2023 that announced indemnification for Microsoft Copilot users who may run afoul of copyright laws while using it. Smith and Nowbar said in such a case, Microsoft would pick up the legal bill.
“[We] will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products,” the two wrote.
The policy called the Customer Copyright Commitment was updated in 2024 to include commercial customers using the Azure OpenAI Service.
In his Microsoft exit post written three months ago, Nowbar took to LinkedIn to say that in the hands of Microsoft’s legal department, the law became a catalyst for innovation, “not just a safeguard.”
“I helped clear antitrust hurdles for transformative acquisitions like Nuance and Activision Blizzard King, supported product and service launches that reshaped the way we work, and introduced the Customer Copyright Commitment to help our customers realize the promise of AI,” Nowbar wrote in his post.
At ServiceNow, Nowbar will oversee global legal, ethics, governance, compliance, risk, ServiceNow.org, impact and sustainability, and corporate and government affairs organizations.
ServiceNow is in the midst of buying cybersecurity company Armis for $7.75 billion, a deal it just announced in December. ServiceNow expects the deal to close in the second half of 2026, subject to regulatory conditions. The company has been on an M&A tear in 2025 with deals to acquire Armis, Cuein, data.world, Logik.ai, Quality 360, and Veza.
Forrester VP and principal analyst Charles Betz previously told The Register that the Armis acquisition gives ServiceNow access to massive volumes of data for its CMDB, making data discovery tools “an order of magnitude” more powerful. Meanwhile data.world, a cloud-native data catalog and data governance platform built for large enterprises, takes vast corporate data sets and makes them searchable and mappable. Together, those two deals in particular signal that ServiceNow is looking at how it manages data “very strategically,” he said. ®