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A $66 billion merger is a lot for any top attorney to handle. But Ellen Fitzsimmons is handling one just a year after she took the legal reins at SunTrust Banks Inc.

The Atlanta-based banking giant announced last week that Fitzsimmons, SunTrust's general counsel and corporate executive vice president since January 2018, will serve on the executive management team of the combined BB&T Corp.-SunTrust organization.

Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based BB&T's senior executive VP, GC, secretary and chief corporate governance officer Robert Johnson Jr. will not be part of the group. In an email responding to a question about Johnson's role with the new company, a BB&T spokesman said, “we're still working through many details [and] don't have any[thing] specific to share right now.”

Fitzsimmons, through a SunTrust spokesman, declined to comment.

One of metro Atlanta's larger legal departments, SunTrust in January 2017 had a team of about 73 attorneys, a majority of whom work in Atlanta, with 16 who are in Richmond, Virginia, where SunTrust Mortgage is based, according to a Daily Report profile of then-GC and corporate secretary Ray Fortin. A search of the Georgia Bar's online membership directory indicates SunTrust currently employs 55 attorneys barred in the state.

Information about the size of BB&T's legal department was not immediately available.

And the fate of those attorneys depends on a number of factors, in-house legal experts said.

“The business isn't any smaller so you could argue that they still need all the lawyers, but they're always going to try to get some synergies,” said Bob Graff, an Atlanta-based partner and recruiter at legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa. “It probably won't be a bloodbath, but I wouldn't want to be the last one hired [at SunTrust].”

The positions that may be more vulnerable, Graff said, are those who practice in specialty areas such as, for example, tax law, intellectual property, privacy or employment law.

“People that aren't directly supporting the business” may be more at risk, he said. “But the amount of loans, number of contracts and other such day-to-day business matters will stay the same, so general commercial lawyers are probably safer.”

Another important factor in the determination is the amount of Fitzsimmons' total legal spend and her philosophy on outside counsel hiring, said Gerald Blanchard, who was part of several bank mergers during his time as a top in-house lawyer at Bank of America Corp. and its predecessor NationsBank Corp. Fortin said he kept “substantially all of [SunTrust's legal] work” in-house, but it was not clear whether Fitzsimmons, an experienced top in-house lawyer who spent 15 years prior to joining SunTrust as GC at railroad company CSX Corp., has maintained the same model.

“She may figure out a way to cut the outside spend instead of cutting head count internally,” Blanchard said.

And that's where the impact of such a merger extends beyond the companies' in-house lawyers to their outside counterparts, said Rees Morrison, a partner at the consultancy firm Altman Weil. Law firms that already represent both companies, as well as those that either specialize in banking but don't count BB&T or SunTrust as clients or those that are looking to break into the market, will be angling for jobs, he added.

Fitzsimmons “will be besieged by law firms right now,” Morrison said. “At some point, the mergers set in motion a [request for proposals] process because they don't need twice as many law firms. They will eventually have to ask, 'Which law firms? What is the weaning process? And how do we look at non-incumbents?'”

Adding another wrinkle to this merger, the legal in-house experts said, is the fact that the new organization has eschewed the location of both SunTrust's and BB&T's current corporate headquarters in favor of Southern banking center Charlotte, North Carolina. While Fitzsimmons, who relocated from Jacksonville, Florida, to Atlanta for her SunTrust position, will most likely be expected to move to Charlotte to work alongside other executive managers, what will be required of the other in-house lawyers is significantly less certain, they added.

“It will be very interesting to see how this plays out,” said Blanchard, adding he predicts the initial size of the legal department in Charlotte will be fairly small, which could necessitate hiring in that market. “The senior management is going to want the GC there, but beyond that, it's a question of, 'How many lawyers does the GC feel she needs to have physically with her?'”