General Counsel
BB&T Corp.
Patricia Oliver has been named general counsel and corporate secretary of BB&T Corp., a financial services company. As head of BB&T’s legal department, she will manage a team of 26 attorneys and legal professionals.
Most recently, Oliver was a partner in the Cleveland, Ohio, office of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, where she led the firm’s financial services practice and served as lead counsel for several well-known financial services companies. Her areas of expertise include Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, corporate governance and regulatory compliance, securities law, and mergers and acquisitions. She is a frequent speaker on banking trends and issues, and a contributing writer for banking journals.
The Erie, Penn., native earned her juris doctorate from Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland, where she served as managing editor of the Law Review. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science from Allegheny College in Meadville, Penn., where she graduated magna cum laude. Oliver is a member of the American Bar Association and chairperson of the Banking and Financial Services section of the Greater Cleveland Bar Association.
Oliver received the 2003 “Rainmaker Award” from Northern Ohio Live magazine for community service. She is a past recipient of the “Professional Woman of Excellence Award” from the Cleveland YWCA, president of the Children’s Aid Society, and a former advisory committee member of the Women’s Community Foundation’s “Women Managing Money” program. She is founder of Cleveland’s “Women in Family Business” seminar series, a former member of Leadership Cleveland and the Junior League of Cleveland Inc., has served as co-chair of Woman-to-Woman, a drug and alcohol community awareness project and is a former board member of the Hitchcock Center for Women, a halfway house for drug-addicted women.