“One of the greatest things to me about being an M&A lawyer is the people whom you get to know over time,” Randi Lesnick said on this week’s Drinks With The Deals podcast. Lesnick, an M&A partner at Jones Day, started doing work for Reynolds as a first-year associate in the late 1990s and has done a string of deals for the tobacco company.

She counseled R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings Inc. on its acquisition of the U.S. business of Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., a subsidiary of British American Tobacco plc, in 2004, the deal that created Reynolds American Inc., and worked with RAI on its $49.4 billion sale to BAT in 2017.

“We joke that one of my kids was my Reynolds baby because I delivered a couple of days early and shortly before the closing of one of the transactions that I worked on,” Lesnick said. And, she added, “I came back from maternity leave and helped sell the Reynolds packaging business in five separate deals” in 2005.

Lesnick, who is counseling the board of Catalent Inc. on the Somerset, N.J.-based pharma company’s pending $16.5 billion sale to Novo Holdings A/S, co-chairs Jones Day’s corporate practice with Vica Irani and Andrew M. Levine, both of whom have also been on the podcast.

In that capacity, Lesnick thinks about how to incorporate generative AI into legal practice. “There are ways that you can use AI that are helpful. But, she added, “AI is not a substitute for legal judgment.”

Listen to the podcast with Randi Lesnick below:

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