Joseph F. Rice, a formidable negotiator who helped states extract multibillion-dollar settlements from tobacco companies and the opioid industry, fundamentally reshaping how corporate America is held accountable for wrongdoing, died on Sept. 3 in Mount Pleasant, S.C., a Lowcountry town near Charleston. He was 72.
A representative for his firm, Motley Rice, said the cause was a cardiac event, which he experienced while at his desk in his law office.
Mr. Rice wore cowboy boots and Southern charm at the bargaining table, where he squared off against hot shot corporate lawyers over astronomical sums of money.
“They were petrified of him,” Jayne Conroy, a lawyer with Simmons Hanly Conroy, an Illinois-based firm that collaborated with Motley Rice, said in an interview. “He was smarter than everyone else. But he was also charismatic and likable, so he could get people to do things and make deals.”
An old school lawyer who drove a pickup truck and rattled off ideas into a Dictaphone — sometimes while riding his horse — Mr. Rice preferred the pragmatism of the negotiating table over courtroom theatrics.
To strengthen his hand, he relied on a novel legal strategy: States and local governments, he argued, had public nuisance claims against corporations, in addition to product liability claims brought by individual consumers. The governments were victims because they were footing the bills for the damage those products caused.
With tobacco, billions of dollars in Medicaid funds were spent treating smoking-related illnesses. With opioids, enormous sums of taxpayer dollars went toward addiction treatment, emergency medical care and other consequences of the epidemic.
By bringing state and local governments into the lawsuits as plaintiffs, Mr. Rice shifted the narrative from individual injuries to the sweeping public costs of corporate misconduct.
It was an audacious tactic that posed an existential threat to entire industries.
“The idea of states going after tobacco companies because they had to divert funds to address smoking-related injuries — that was a totally wild idea,” Nora Freeman Engstrom, a Stanford Law School professor, said in an interview. “Joe was a mastermind at legal theory and the detail guy who got things done.”
The strategy Mr. Rice helped pioneer is still being used to take on powerful industries. Motley Rice represents state attorneys who are suing social media companies for allegedly harming the mental health of teenagers.
For lawyers, it is an incredibly lucrative method.
Mr. Rice’s firm stood to make as much as $2 billion for its work on the $206 billion settlement between tobacco companies and states in 1998, according to The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C.
“Yeah, it’s a lot of money,” Mr. Rice told The New York Times. “But nobody gave us a chance in hell when we started out.”
The big payday, he argued, was deserved.
“Why should the lawyers who carried the burden and led the fight not be paid like a chief executive officer of a corporation?” he said.
Legal scholars say the enormous payments to lawyers were a side effect of deals that ultimately benefited public health.
The tobacco settlement included provisions for reducing cigarette advertising, contributing to lower smoking rates, especially among teenagers. The opioid settlements led to tighter monitoring of narcotic drug shipments, as well as funding earmarked for treatment programs.
“Is there some abuse in the plaintiff’s bar? Absolutely,” Professor Engstrom said. “But on balance, are more people alive than otherwise would have been? In my view, yes.”
Joseph Fred Rice was born on March 25, 1954, in Winnsboro, S.C., about 30 miles north of Columbia. His father, Donnie Rice Jr., was a textile worker. His mother, Betty (Dunlap) Rice, worked in real estate.
His grandfather, a mill paymaster, collected books on law.
“When he had a spare dollar, or actually probably 50 cents back then, he would go buy a law book, and he’d read up on the law,” Mr. Rice told Law360, a legal news site, in 2019. “I had some of those law books when I was growing up, so I got interested, I think at first because it was intriguing.”
During high school, he worked in textile mills, where he first learned the art of mediation.
“Sometimes the guy driving the forklift truck and the guy setting the machines up were not necessarily buddies,” he said last year in an interview with Super Lawyers, a legal information site. “If one was late, it hurt the other one, and we had some negotiation to do in a situation like that.”
He enrolled at the University of South Carolina, graduating in 1976 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a transcript that reflected the good times he had as president of his fraternity, Alpha Tau Omega.
Mr. Rice applied to South Carolina’s law school and was offered a spot in a summer program for borderline applicants; he was eventually admitted. (The law school was named after him in 2023.)
He graduated in 1979 and got an offer from Ron Motley, a lawyer at Blatt & Fales in Barnwell, S.C., to work on a case involving nuclear fuel rods.
While Mr. Rice was soft-spoken and folksy, Mr. Motley was a showman who once wore a lab coat to cross-examine a doctor.
Still, they formed an enduring and lucrative partnership in scores of product liability cases, beginning with hundreds of suits filed against asbestos companies in the 1980s.
The asbestos litigation became a blueprint for pursuing entire industries at once — an undertaking that required Mr. Rice to marshal vast coalitions of plaintiffs, lawyers and experts, as well as state attorneys general and municipal officials.
On the other side of the table, defense lawyers had confidence that Mr. Rice could deliver what they ultimately wanted: peace.
“I viewed him as a tough negotiator, but he knew how to close a deal,” Sheila L. Birnbaum, the national co-counsel for Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, said in an interview. “He always had that charming Southern mannerism that held him in good stead.”
Mr. Rice married Lisa Summer in 1979. She survives him, along with their daughter, Ann E. Rice Ervin, a lawyer at Motley Rice; a sister, Ann Rice Phillips; a brother, Don Rice III; and a grandson.
Mr. Rice worked until he died, but he did find time to enjoy his enormous wealth. He owned a ranch and a 100-foot yacht, and he was among the biggest fans (and financial supporters) of the University of South Carolina football team.
He also indulged in cigars.
“Everybody says, ‘Well, you sued over cigarettes and there’s tobacco in that,’” Mr. Rice said in the Super Lawyers interview. “I said, ‘I sued the cigarette industry. I didn’t sue the cigar industry.’”
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