Gartner Hires Top Thomson Reuters Lawyer as Next Legal Chief

Thomson Reuters Corp. has promoted Jimma Elliott-Stevens as interim chief legal officer and company secretary for the Canadian conglomerate.

Elliott-Stevens spent the past three years as general counsel and chief compliance and privacy officer for the company. She temporarily succeeds Thomas Kim, who on April 17 became general counsel at Stamford, Conn.-based research and consulting company Gartner Inc.

Kim and Gartner didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Thomson Reuters is “conducting a full internal and external search” for a new legal chief and company secretary, said spokesman Andrew Green.

The company previously promoted two other lawyers—Jennifer Ruddick and Katharine Larsen—to deputy general counsel.

Larsen, most recently chief counsel for Reuters News, is now deputy general counsel for litigation. Ruddick, a former associate general counsel for corporate and securities, last year took on the additional role of deputy company secretary at Toronto-based Thomson Reuters.

Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News, competes with Thomson Reuters in providing financial news and services.

New Top Lawyers

Gartner confirmed Kim’s hire in a proxy statement filed last week. He replaced Gartner’s former general counsel and corporate secretary, Jules Kaufman, who stepped down last summer after five years as its top lawyer.

Kaufman received $3.6 million in total compensation from Gartner last year, including roughly $1 million in separation payments after his resignation on Sept. 1, 2022, per the company’s proxy. Kaufman officially left Gartner in midFebruary after being retained in an “on call” capacity, according to the filing.

Kim took over the top legal job at Thomson Reuters in 2019 from Deirdre Stanley, who left the company to lead the law department at cosmetics giant Estee Lauder Cos. Inc. Stanley was the first-ever legal chief for the combined Thomson Reuters, formed in 2008 after Canada’s Thomson Corp. acquired the UK-based Reuters Group PLC in a $17 billion deal.

Kim joined a subsidiary of what was then Reuters Group as a compliance lawyer in 1999 after starting his career as an associate at Baker McKenzie and a Duane Morris predecessor in San Francisco.

Elliott-Stevens, Kim’s interim replacement at Thomson Reuters, joined the company in 2019 from Rackspace Technology Inc. She was a deputy general counsel and chief privacy officer for the cloud computing company.

She attracted attention last year when she testifyied as a character witness for former Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann, who was acquitted on charges of lying to the FBI. Sussmann joined Fenwick & West as a partner this month.

Elliott-Stevens worked with Sussmann at the Justice Department, where he served as a career mentor to her and eventually became godfather to her son, according to reports about Elliott-Stevens’s testimony.

Davis Wright Tremaine, Ballard Spahr, Baker & Hostetler, and Epstein Becker & Green are among the law firms most often turned to by Thomson Reuters for counsel in US federal courts in recent years, according to Bloomberg Law data. Latham & Watkins partner Peter Harwich handles transactions for the company.