Around the house

Jill Sutton, the former vice executive and general counsel for Tim Hortons Inc, is joining General Motors as its corporate secretary and deputy general counsel for corporate, finance and strategic transactions. Jill Sutton will be reporting to Craig Glidden, the new GC of General Motors. He was appointed to replace Michael Millikin, who will retire this summer after 40 years in the company. Craig Glidden said last Thursday in a statement: 'Jill is a highly accomplished executive, having served as the general counsel and corporate secretary of a publicly traded company, and she has helped lead significant corporate transactions, including the Tim Hortons IPO and its eventual sale to Burger King.' 

Law firm Steptoe & Johnson has appointed Wendell Willkie II as counsel in the firm’s New York office. Mr Willkie joins Steptoe from MeadWestvaco, where he was senior vice president, general counsel and secretary until the company’s merger on 1 July with RockTenn to become WestRock, a global packaging company with more than $15 billion in annual revenue. For more than two decades, Mr Willkie was a senior member of the executive leadership team at MeadWestvaco (previously Westvaco), a forest products company. At the company, Mr Willkie had responsibility for all legal matters, including governance and global compliance issues, as well as global government relations. In the Reagan administration, he served as associate counsel to the president, and then as chief of staff and general counsel of the Department of Education. In the George H W Bush administration, he served as general counsel and ultimately as the acting deputy secretary at the Department of Commerce. While there, he led delegations of general counsels of a number of America’s most prominent public companies and senior officials of other government agencies in missions to the EU, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Japan and Israel, promoting regulatory policies to expand international trade and investment. Under President George W Bush, he served on the president’s advisory committee for trade policy and negotiations. He has also served on the legal advisory committee of the New York Stock Exchange, the emerging markets advisory committee of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the boards of several prominent international nonprofit institutions.

HealthSouth has announced the retirement of its general counsel and executive vice president John Whittington. Mr Whittington began his career in HealthSouth in 2006 as interim general counsel and corporate secretary. In the same year, he was named general counsel and EVP. Prior to that, he practiced law for 15 years at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings. During this, he also taught in Samford University's Cumberland School of Law as a professor. He will retire at the end of the year but will act as of counsel. HealthSouth will now begin searching for a new general counsel.

Taxi aggregator Uber has appointed Mohit Abraham as its head of legal in India. Mr Abraham was an associate partner in the Delhi litigation department of Khaitan & Co, which he joined a year previously when the law firm acquired his firm PXV Law Partners. He trained at Amarchand Mangaldas.