Meritor Taps Another Legal Chief Who’s Championed Diversity (1)

Hannah Lim-Johnson will join Troy, Mich.-based Meritor Inc. as senior vice president and chief legal officer next month, continuing Meritor’s streak of hiring legal leaders with track records of advocating for diversity.

Lim-Johnson will officially assume her new position with the automobile component manufacturer on Aug. 3, according to a statement from the company Monday. She replaces April Miller Boise, who is now general counsel at power management company Eaton Corp.

Prior to joining Meritor, Lim-Johnson was the senior vice president and chief legal officer at Kelly Services Inc. for three years, leaving her post in March. She was replaced, according to a securities filing, by the company’s chief transactional counsel as interim general counsel.

Lim-Johnson revamped the workforce management and consulting company’s interactions with outside counsel, including an initiative to diversify Kelly’s external legal partners.

Lim-Johnson sits on the board of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, an advocacy group dedicated to promoting diversity in the legal industry. She also served in various legal leadership roles at energy company Public Service Enterprise Group, ADT Security Services, and security company Tyco International.

“Hannah brings more than two decades of experience leading high-performing legal teams and managing legal strategy for publicly traded companies,” said Meritor CEO Jay Craig in a statement. “Her extensive expertise in legal affairs and track record of success will be a great addition to the Meritor Executive Committee.”

According to Lim-Johnson, the legal department at Meritor is relatively small and she will have six direct reports in her role as CLO.

Meritor’s former chief legal officer, Miller Boise, left the company in December 2019 after three years and was replaced temporarily by interim general counsel Scott Confer. Like Lim-Johnson, Miller Boise devoted time to advocating for a more diverse legal profession.

“One of the reasons I joined [Meritor] was because of their commitment to D&I,” Lim-Johnson said in an interview.

“I saw, for the first time last week, a copy of the organizational chart,” she said. “I was really pleased to see that the team is very diverse, so I’ll point to my predecessor in the role, April Miller Boise, who has also been a champion in this area.”

While she was at Meritor, Miller Boise and current Thompson Hines senior counsel Ernest Tuckett co-founded the Black General Counsel 2025 Initiative, which was officially launched earlier this year.

The Black GC Initiative maintains a list of all Black general counsel and chief legal officers of Fortune 1000 companies and aims to increase the number of of Black legal leaders in those companies to 100 in the next five years. As of Monday, their website lists 56 Black legal leaders.