Going into the tobacco industry totally changed his life. He continued to do Intellectual Property law and brand protection. He got heavily involved with sponsorship work, particularly Formula One Motor Racing. For him, it was a fascinating industry. On the other hand, ironically, he considered legal work, especially Intellectual Property, relatively boring and mundane. But he was interested in business and was fascinated by the fact that he was in an industry that killed millions of people a year but remained completely legal. He never saw himself as someone who should be ashamed that he was working for a tobacco company because, as a lawyer he had been taught, and all lawyers believe this (or at least they should), that everyone is entitled to the best possible legal counsel they can obtain. His client was not doing anything illegal, and, as far as he was concerned, he was standing up for their rights like any other attorney stands up for their clients.           

 

When he began in Tobacco, he was not immune to the existing preconceptions. He too thought things would be clandestine. But what he found was an industry that was very cautious, and policy and compliance oriented. Everything was run through the legal department. Compliance was everywhere. As a result, he was very involved in a business which he found fascinating. There were no clandestine measures – such as spiking cigarettes with nicotine, denying that nicotine is addictive, or that smoking kills. That may have been true once, but not in the last 30 years, and certainly not during his tenure. At Gallaher, he was their UK counsel working primarily on their business in the UK and Ireland, and various western European files (Iberia, France, Benelux, Italy, and others.) In 2005, he was sent to Lausanne in Switzerland.           

 

It was a great growth industry not just because they valued professionalism, but also because, given the climate, good employees were hard to come by. He fit the bill and advanced very quickly. He was Counsel, then Senior Counsel, Assistant General Counsel and, finally, General Counsel. ​In 2008, Gallaher was acquired by Japan Tobacco (JTI), the third largest tobacco company in the world. Internationally, they own all the historical Reynolds’ brands, including Camel and Natural American Spirit.  

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At the time, JTI was half owned by the Japanese Ministry of Finance. So, for a period of time, technically, he was a Japanese civil servant. (Their offices were located in Geneva, so he commuted there every day from Lausanne.)

 

He was high enough up in the organization at the time of the takeover to be of interest to the JTI management takeover team, but not so high that, unlike his boss and her boss, he wasn’t immediately let go. That made him the senior most ranking lawyer to stay with the company. ​At JTI he had been given a portfolio that he had never done before. He went from being Senior Counsel for Europe to being the lawyer for Business Development. Even though he had the title of Assistant General Counsel, his job for the year and a half that he was there was to sell off the parts of Gallaher that they did not want to keep. So, in truth, it was not “Business Development” but rather “Business Undevelopment.”

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Based on his performance, he was promoted well above where he should have been for someone his age. He was sitting on boards of directors in his 30s, with men and women 20-25 years older than he was, in different stages of their careers, laughing at him because he would arrive with dark bags under his eyes from not getting any sleep because he had two screaming babies at home. As some of them were pleased to point out, their kids had graduated from college around the time his were born! Eventually, he decided to leave R.J. Reynolds, partially because of the need to move and partially because of a Christmas card.