Eve Burton ’89LAW
Senior Vice President & Chief Legal Officer
Hearst

Eve Burton is a senior vice president and the chief legal officer of Hearst, one of the nation’s largest diversified media, information, and services companies with more than 360 global businesses. Hearst’s major interests span business information companies that create and deliver content, analytics and workflow solutions for the finance, healthcare and transportation industries worldwide as well as cable entertainment and syndication, interactive and emerging digital media, local broadcast television, magazines, newspapers, and real estate.

Burton is a member of the Hearst Board of Directors. She has overall responsibility for legal services to all of Hearst’s businesses around the world. She also manages corporate human resources issues, Oracle HCM Operations, labor relations and government affairs. Burton has been one of Hearst’s leaders in establishing worldwide strategic enterprise deals with partners. Additionally, she is a member of Hearst’s venture committee, which funds digital initiatives and is a founder and chairwoman of HearstLab, which fosters innovation and investment in early stage businesses led by women.

Burton sits on the board of directors of Intuit, Inc., and prior to that was on the AOL board until its sale to Verizon. She is a member of the advisory board of the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford and Columbia Universities, and is a trustee of Middlebury College. Burton has a JD from Columbia University and was a Fulbright Scholar in Asia.

Prior to joining Hearst, Burton served as chief legal counsel at CNN where she led the first efforts by the press to gain streaming access from the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. From 1995-2000, she was at the New York Daily News where she supported the newsroom to open up family courts to the press and gained access to information Mayor Giuliani and his administration kept sealed in many areas of city government. Burton began her career at Weil, Gotshal & Manges after serving as a law clerk for the late Hon. Leonard B. Sand in the United States District Court of New York.

The Hearst Office of General Counsel has a dedicated initiative to the ongoing protection of First Amendment rights for its journalists and the preservation of a free press and was awarded a lifetime First Amendment Award from the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press in 2016.