Matthew Hamel, ’86: Leading in International Law and Business from Louisville
Matthew Hamel, ’86, is executive vice president, general counsel, and secretary of Louisville-based Brown-Forman Corporation, one of the world’s largest makers and sellers of beverage alcohol. Offering brands that include Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey, Woodford Reserve bourbon, Finlandia vodka, Herradura tequila, and Chambord liqueur, Brown-Forman does business in more than 135 countries.
Hamel’s career has been marked by global legal responsibilities in a wide range of business enterprises. After joining White & Case after graduating from the Law School, it wasn’t long before he was assigned to the firm’s Stockholm office (he had studied in Sweden as a Fulbright Scholar and spoke the language). From there, he relocated to Warsaw just as commercial activity there and elsewhere in central Europe was heating up after the fall of the Berlin Wall. After four years abroad, he returned to the United States to take responsibility for legal matters in central and eastern Europe, Turkey, central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa as general counsel of Colgate-Palmolive’s International Business Development Group.
He next became general counsel and secretary at Factiva, a joint venture between Dow Jones and Reuters that aggregated business information online and made it available to subscribers worldwide. When Dow Jones bought out Reuters and integrated Factiva into a broader Enterprise Media Group (combining it with DJ Newswires and Indexes), Hamel became Vice President, Legal, of the group and an associate general counsel of Dow Jones. In 2007, he moved into his current role at Brown-Forman.
“Being responsible for legal matters in a wide array of countries at one time or another during my career, in several different industries, I haven’t always had every answer at my fingertips, but thanks to my education at the Law School I have always trusted that I could at least understand the first principles and therefore ask the right question. After that, it’s not hard to find someone who can figure it out,” Hamel says. “I might not know what the law is, but I know what it should be, and that’s proven to be a good starting point for reaching the best outcome.”
He further credits the Law School with helping him succeed with his broader responsibilities as a member of Brown-Forman’s executive team, where he is involved in major business decisions that include establishing corporate strategy and formulating crucial company-wide initiatives. “I often find myself thinking, ‘I didn’t take this class in law school,’ but the skills I learned at the Law School for analyzing problems and finding solutions have served me well,” he says.
He serves on the Visiting Committee and is an enthusiastic supporter of the Law School’s recent initiatives to prepare students for careers in business, such as the Doctoroff Business Leadership Program.
Because Brown-Forman is a publicly listed company that is family controlled—one of only about 130 such companies in the United States —its governance environment presents many distinctive challenges, regarding nepotism and related-party transactions, for example. Hamel has led the formation of a network of general counsel and other senior governance officers from similarly structured companies. The group meets twice a year to exchange information and advice.
He and his family—wife Lena and daughters Emilie (a recent graduate of Northwestern) and Olivia (a sophomore at Yale)—find Louisville a hospitable place to call home. He is on the board of governors of the city’s Speed Art Museum, which is currently undergoing a substantial multiyear expansion and renovation that Hamel believes will make it into a destination art museum, and he is a director of the Louisville-based Kentucky Opera. He notes with satisfaction that Louisville’s bustling arts scene is complemented by its many excellent restaurants.
“We have been happy everywhere we’ve lived,” Hamel says, “but since we arrived in Louisville we really haven’t looked back.”