Big Tobacco is known as a formidable legal adversary, skilled and even ruthless in the courtroom. Yet the industry is being slowly undone by its former secrets, having obligingly preserved piles of incriminating documents for its enemies to use.
Several answers emerge, both from interviews and the documents themselves.
Unlike other beleaguered industries, cigarette makers faced the unique pressure of nearly continuous litigation, which made large-scale document destruction potentially dangerous and illegal. There are rules of law that you cannot properly destroy documents . They just couldn't destroy all that. The companies, proud of their unbeaten legal record, were also blind to the risks of being made to surrender their secrets. They believed they had built an impenetrable wall around their wrongdoing, and . . .