BT has appointed chief counsel of mergers and acquisitions Rachel Canham as its new company secretary, as longstanding senior lawyer Dan Fitz leaves the company.

Canham has worked at BT since 2011, first as a senior commercial lawyer in the company's transactional team, before being appointed chief counsel of M&A in 2013. She will start her new role as company secretary on 1 November.

Before joining the telecommunications giant, Canham was an associate in the corporate practice at Latham & Watkins for three years. 

BT previously combined the roles of GC and company secretary, before splitting the role this spring when Dan Fitz stepped down from the role. Former AB Inbev GC Sabine Chalmers was appointed GC while Fitz took up the role of company secretary.

Canham and Chalmers will now work together to oversee all the in-house legal teams at BT.

Fitz,  who has been one of the telecoms industry's most high-profile GCs, leaves BT after eight years. He was previously GC at Cable & Wireless for 11 years, and spent six years as GC and company secretary at Misys (now Finastra). 

He will now join The Francis Crick Institute, a joint project between Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council and three London universities – UCL, Imperial and King's College London.

Speaking about his move earlier this year, Fitz said: "It will be very different to all my previous jobs in-house – it'll be my first time outside of a PLC environment and in a charity. I'll be doing more IP. Also, I'll need to understand the governance of large charities and of the Crick's large academic founders. It works closely with its founder institutions, with a lot of people and resource sharing – I'll need to get on top of that quickly. "