After 20 years in the Law Department of the largest tobacco company in the United States, Gaye Montgomery retired from Corporate America and started her own boutique corporate compliance law firm, Montgomery Compliance Law, PLLC.
Montgomery Compliance Law understands the intricacies of the modern corporate ecosystem and uses that knowledge to help businesses build and oversee effective and vibrant compliance programs that allow their companies to take calculated risks, make value enhancing business decisions and stay out of trouble.
During her 20-year career with a company subject to high legal and regulatory scrutiny and significant compliance risk, Gaye acquired deep expertise and assembled a strong portfolio of skills in corporate compliance and compliance risk management, supply chain integrity, antitrust and sales, distribution and promotion. Gaye led a number of law department practice groups and served on the law department’s leadership team for over a decade. During this time, she counseled senior executives on game-changing sales, distribution and promotion innovations, all while the company was defending successive antitrust challenges to its sales, distribution and promotion programs. Gaye collaborated with the sales team to introduce a number of innovative training programs, culminating with the production of an original film, Breathing Underwater, which earned a gold World Medal at New York Festivals World’s Best TV and Film Awards.
Most recently, as head of the Global Compliance Practice Group, Gaye had management accountability for the corporation’s Anticorruption Compliance Program and counseled the company’s Risk Oversight Committee on regulatory compliance issues, including third-party risk mitigation, cyber security oversight, economic sanctions compliance and evolving expectations of executive management and public company boards to oversee enterprise risk and compliance. Under Gaye’s leadership, the Global Compliance Practice Group drove the company’s transition from a mature US-centric approach to a modern global compliance approach. Her efforts in this role were recognized in 2016 when she was short-listed for Global Counsel Awards’ Compliance Innovator of the Year Award.
Before entering Corporate America, Gaye was an associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York City, a judicial law clerk in the Southern District of California, and a systems engineer with Electronic Data Systems in Dallas, Texas.
Gaye’s in-house counsel knowledge and hands-on experience developing and overseeing compliance programs under the crucible of litigation and in the face of increasing expectations of corporate directors and executives informs her holistic and integrative approach to compliance and allows her to devise compliance strategies uniquely tailored to a company’s risk environment, risk appetite and strategic goals.