In Tobacco Suits, States Find Strength in Numbers

“As the list of suing states grew, management of the complex relationships among the myriad attorneys general became nightmarish. Even with nearly constant communication via conference calls, lines of stress were increasingly obvious as the far-flung attorneys general staked out their positions. Minnesota Attorney General Hubert H. Humphrey III and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, for example, have taken an increasingly hard-line position against making deals with the industry as pressure for a settlement has grown.

’When you’re in a war,’ Moore said, ‘not only do you have to keep your enemy off balance, you’ve got to keep your own team together.’

As the tensions increased, the attorneys general turned to a colleague, James Tierney, to help provide a kind of glue to keep the unwieldy machine together. Tierney, a rangy former Maine attorney general turned business consultant, offers a combination of management skills and legal prowess to help his colleagues run their offices and lawsuits. Other attorneys general call him ‘America’s 51st attorney general.’

Working out of an upstairs bedroom in his old yellow farmhouse in the tiny town of Lisbon Falls, Maine, Tierney spends hours following up each of the strategic conference calls by helping each office sort out what one attorney general might have meant by a curt comment or what peculiarity of another state’s law makes its litigation position more difficult.”

John Schwartz, "In Tobacco Suits, States Find Strength in Numbers," Washington Post, May 18, 1997.