Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz has appointed Willard Tom as general counsel for the agency. In addition, several other appointments have been made to senior positions in the agency’s Competition and Economics Bureaus and the Office of Congressional Relations.

Tom, who has been practicing antitrust law as a partner in Morgan Lewis’s Washington, D.C. office, is rejoining the Commission, where he was deputy director of the Bureau of Competition and led the Bureau’s policy office under former Chairman Robert Pitofsky. He previously served as counselor to the head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, responsible for intellectual property, vertical restraints, and telecommunications matters. As the Commission’s chief legal officer and adviser, the general counsel represents the agency in court and provides legal counsel to the Commission and its bureaus and office.

Additional appointments at the FTC include:

Pete Levitas, who will be a deputy director of the Bureau of Competition, joins the agency from Dickstein Shapiro in Washington, D.C. He formerly was staff director and chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust, Competition Policy & Consumer Rights Subcommittee. Levitas also served as Antitrust Counsel to the Subcommittee Chairman, former U.S. Senator Mike DeWine. In addition, he worked in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C.

Mark Frankena, who will become associate director for Competition Policy of the Bureau of Economics, has been deputy director for Antitrust in the Bureau for the past five years. He formerly served as associate Professor of Economics at the University of Western Ontario, and as a principal at Economists Inc., an economics consulting firm where he specialized in antitrust litigation and the electric power industry.

Howard Shelanski will become deputy director for antitrust at the Bureau of Economics. Since 1997 he has been a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where he co-directed the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology and was an affiliated professor at the Haas School of Business. He recently joined the Georgetown University Law Center faculty. Shelanski has served as chief economist for the Federal Communications Commission and as a senior economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers.

Judy Bailey, who was appointed as deputy director of the Office of Congressional Relations, returns to the FTC after serving as Consumer Protection Counsel for the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection Subcommittee. She also was counsel to the House Judiciary Committee’s former Monopolies and Commercial Law Subcommittee, and she worked for the FTC, including service in the Bureau of Competition as assistant director, and as deputy executive director and acting executive director. She has worked at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and in private practice at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and Debevoise & Plimpton.