Barra Defends GM's Top Lawyer In Face Of Blistering Attack from Lawmakers

Joann Muller

Forbes Staff

In ancient Japan, GM’s top lawyer might have faced disembowelment, a form of ritual suicide known as hara-kiri, as punishment for his legal staff’s role in allowing a deadly safety defect to go unreported for more than a decade.

But neither Michael Millikin, 65, nor any other top GM executives are likely to fall on their swords in the wake of the one of the biggest safety crises in U.S. automotive history. Instead, the 37-year GM veteran will probably receive a handsome retirement package when the dust clears, secure in the belief that he had no idea his own staffers were sitting on important evidence of a widespread and deadly ignition flaw blamed for at least 13 deaths and leading to the recall of almost 30 million vehicles at a cost of more than $2.5 billion.

Millikin sustained a blistering attack Thursday from U.S. lawmakers, who said he should be held responsible for lower-level attorneys who sought to keep legal settlements involving the faulty ignition switches from becoming public. Noting that others within GM had warned at least four times of potential liability related to the defective switch, McCaskill said she couldn’t believe Millikin hadn’t been fired.

“I do not understand how the General Counsel for a litigation department that had this massive failure of responsibility, how he would be allowed to continue in that important leadership role in this company,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, chairwoman of the Senate Commerce subcommittee.  “This is either gross negligence or gross incompetence on the part of a lawyer.”

Rising to Millikin’s defense was GM Chief Executive Mary Barra,who also testified Thursday before the Senate Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on consumer protection, product safety and insurance. Barra described Millikin as “a man of incredibly high integrity” and said “he is the person I need on this team” to ensure mistakes made in this case are never repeated. Barra said high-level attorneys who did know about the flaw have already been fired. More than half of the 15 employees who were dismissed from GM in early June were lawyers or product investigators who worked for the legal department. Millikin said he didn’t know of the ignition flaw until early February, when GM issued its first recall.

An internal investigation found a pattern of incompetence and neglect since the early 2000s that delayed GM’s recall of millions of Chevrolet Cobalts, Saturn Ions and other vehicles in which the  ignition switch could slip out of position, causing the car to stall, disabling air bags, power steering and power brakes. Millikin acknowledged that even after damaging evidence surfaced in a lawsuit in April 2013, GM lawyers failed to alert the company’s engineers.  “That was tragic. If they had brought it to my attention at that time, I certainly would have made sure that they had done something,” he said.

The carmaker has already accepted blame through a consent decree with the U.S. government for failing to notify safety regulators of the issue in a timely manner.  GM still faces the possibility of criminal charges from the U.S. Justice Department, which is investigating. Several state attorneys general are also conducting their own probes.

GM has established a victims’ fund overseen by disaster-compensation expert Kenneth Feinberg to reimburse those who lost loved ones or suffered serious injuries as a result of the flawed switch. Feinberg and Barra both said Thursday there is no cap on the amount of money GM will pay.  “We are committed to treating each of them with compassion, decency and fairness,” said Barra.