Eve Burton
Former Board Member, 2017-2024
Eve Burton is an executive vice president and the chief legal officer of Hearst, a leading global diversified media, information, and services companies, with more than 360 global businesses. Hearst’s major interests span cable entertainment and syndication, interactive and emerging digital media, local broadcast television, magazines, newspapers, and real estate, as well as business information companies that create and deliver content, analytics, and workflow solutions for the finance, healthcare, and transportation industries worldwide.
Burton is a member of Hearst’s board of directors. She has overall responsibility of day-to-day management for the Office of General Counsel, which provides legal services to all of Hearst’s businesses around the world. She also manages Oracle HCM technology operations, compliance, corporate human resource issues, 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 the co-founder of and oversees HearstLab, which fosters innovation and investment in early-stage businesses led by women.
Burton sits on the board of directors of Intuit Inc. and previously was on the board of directors of AOL 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.
Prior to joining Hearst, Burton served as vice president and chief legal counsel at CNN, where she oversaw all legal matters relating to news and other programming on CNN networks and websites. From 1995 to 2000, Burton was at the New York Daily News as the deputy general counsel. She began her career at the law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges after serving as a law clerk for Judge Leonard B. Sand of the United States District Court of New York. Burton was a Fulbright research scholar at Thammasat University in Bangkok.
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. Burton has won the Fulbright Award for her international work. She was also named an Outstanding Woman of the Bar by the New York County Lawyers’ Association.