About The B&W/American Documents

Welcome to the Brown & Williamson document collection.

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company maintains these collections of documents in accordance with the 1998 Attorneys General settlement to give the public access to documents produced by Brown & Williamson individually and as successor by merger to "The American Tobacco Company" (referred to here as "American") in various lawsuits and proceedings. More than 8,000,000 pages have already been posted in this collection.

Before reviewing these documents, please note the following:

• The documents produced by Brown & Williamson and American in the various lawsuits and proceedings are a subset of a larger collection of documents. For many reasons, the documents are not necessarily sequential. For example, certain privileged and work product documents, personnel documents, and documents designated as trade secret and other confidential or highly competitively sensitive documents are not available for viewing on this website. Therefore, numbering gaps may appear between some documents.
• The index herein relies upon human review of millions of pages. While efforts were made to check fielded data for accuracy and insure the index is accurate and complete, discrepancies may occur.
• Certain oversized documents, videotapes, and other types of materials due to their physical nature will be made available at the physical document depository for State of Minnesota, et al. v. Philip Morris, Inc., et al., No. C1-94-8565 (2D Dist, MN) (referred to as the "Minnesota litigation") rather than at this website.
• These documents were produced in response to Requests for Production of Documents in the various lawsuits and proceedings. These requests were modified in many instances by court orders, agreements between the parties, and/or applicable law.
• An accurate understanding of the meaning and significance of the information in these documents can only be derived by considering the full context surrounding that information. This context includes, but is not limited to: the document as a whole; related contemporaneous documents and discussions within the company; and the events, discussions and issues within the worldwide public health community and society at large at the time the documents were written.