Roderick Hills Continues Crusade to Improve Ethics

For Roderick Hills, one of the newly appointed outside directors meant to oversee investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., the acceptance of a top legal job in Washington recently has sparked a few barbs from his friends.

Hills was named in late April as head of the Washington office of Donovan Leisure Newton & Irvine, a prominent New York-based law firm. He said the twin appointments have brought a few jokes from his colleagues.

“They keep asking ‘did you think you needed 200 lawyers?’ ” he told Reuters.

Hills was named to Drexel’s board as part of the investment banking company’s settlement this month of massive securities fraud charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. He is one of three new outside directors who will also serve as an oversight committee to monitor Drexel’s internal audits and controls.

At the same time, Hills has been active in corporate raiding, and has launched a proxy fight to unseat the management of a long-troubled electrical company.

But Hills, who is married to Carla A. Hills, the U.S. Trade Representative, is no stranger to financial regulation. In 1975, he served as White House counsel to President Gerald R. Ford and was then named chairman of the SEC, where he remained until the conclusion of the Ford Administration.

He is also taking his role at Drexel seriously.

“My charge is to make sure that employees at Drexel can have confidence that their company is being run and managed in an appropriate fashion,” Hills said in a telephone interview.

“I don’t have an opinion as to what was wrong, if it was wrong, at Drexel,” he said.