Monday, February 4, 2008

The Mover

Legal eagle's tech career lands him in biofuels

By Jay Rizoli

Even when your career goal isn't to be a lawyer, a law degree goes a long way. In Gerald Haines's case, the degree has taken him to the latest stop in a career that includes the legal, plastics and networking industries.

Haines is now executive vice president and chief legal officer at Verenium Inc., a Cambridge-based developer of biofuels and specialty enzyme products. The West Virginia-born, Pennsylvania-bred Haines says that he chose a college in Boston because he saw it as the place with the greatest concentration of business, technology and academia. He attended Boston University because its biomedical engineering program offered a lot of biotechnology-related electives he could take as a business major. The road to law school started later.

"I didn't have that planned when I entered undergrad, but I concluded that a law degree and the training that goes with it would be a rigorous adjunct to what I already had," said Haines, who first joined Choate Hall & Stewart LLP in Boston. "I went to a law firm largely with the intention of doing what I'm doing now."

Haines took his legal practice experience in-house at Applied Extrusion Technologies, a developer and manufacturer of polypropylene films for packaging, and later to a similar corporate counsel position at Cabletron Systems Inc. At Cabletron, he managed the varied dispositions of four subsidiaries, eventually joining one of them, network communications provider Enterasys Networks Inc., as executive vice president of strategic affairs and chief legal officer. At Enterasys, he oversaw a 15-person legal department and played a role in business planning, restructuring and overhauling corporate policies and procedures.

"Enterasys was something that many people thought by right that we would fail, and we made it profitable," Haines said. "The range of things I experienced there was much broader than anything I anticipated, and while I might not have chosen to build my experience that way, it was rewarding in an environment with lots of turmoil and lots to do."

Verenium, formed last year from the merger of Celunol Corp. and Diversa Corp., presents for Haines an opportunity unlike any previous one, but according to him "it's a logical build."

The company is a developer of cellulosic ethanol from biomass -- organic waste material that derives from sources such as hemp, corn, willow and sugarcane -- and specialty enzymes intended for use in other biofuels.

"I'm always looking forward, not just where I am but what's next, and Verenium represents a culmination of that for me," Haines said. "Commercial ethanol is a reality -- commercial, economic and technological. We will look back at this as a key inflection point. And that's a real opportunity that you can't find in a lot of places."

Jay Rizoli is a freelance writer in Franklin.