As General Motors faces a number of continuing investigations into its handling of a vehicle safety defect linked to 13 deaths, its legal department has become a focus of a broad internal inquiry into how the company handled the issue, according to two people with knowledge of the inquiry.Even as G.M. acknowledged that it knew about the defect for more than a decade, it has insisted that work on defective ignition switches was limited to a handful of midlevel employees.
But a review of internal documents, emails and interviews paint a different picture, showing that high-ranking officials, particularly in G.M.’s legal department, led by the general counsel Michael P. Millikin, acted with increasing urgency in the last 12 months to grapple with the spreading impact of the ignition problem.
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