Daniel Sanders (Courtesy photo)

Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough will welcome Daniel Sanders Jr., top in-house lawyer at Michelin, later this month.

Sanders most recently served as the automotive tire manufacturer's general counsel, vice president and chief compliance officer.

“I've had a super 21-year-long career at Michelin,” Sanders said in an interview Tuesday morning. “It's a good time for change.”

Effective March 15, Sanders will join as a partner in the Greenville, South Carolina, and Atlanta offices of Nelson Mullins, where he plans to focus on corporate and litigation matters, specifically in the automotive, tire and transportation industries.

It's a return trip for Sanders, who worked at the firm before joining Michelin's litigation group back in 1996.

At the time, he said, he was representing an automobile company as a co-defendant in a product liability case when the other defendant, Michelin, asked if he'd want to join the company as an in-house lawyer.

Sanders said it was funny timing, because he'd been asking the firm about secondment opportunities with a company and thought he'd spend only a couple of years in-house.

Only a few years after he joined Michelin, the auto industry faced a crisis. In 2000, as part of the Ford and Firestone recall, millions of tires were recalled, and dozens of deaths were linked to defective tires. Sanders and his colleagues in the Michelin legal department were forced to react to the newly-intensified scrutiny industrywide.

At Michelin, Sanders worked his way up from a manager in the product law group to the director of litigation five years later, according to his LinkedIn profile.

For most of his tenure, he was based in Michelin's North American headquarters in Greenville. But from 2006 to 2008, he and his family moved to Clermont-Ferrand, France, to work from the company's global headquarters.

“That was a gift to me and my family,” Sanders said, noting that working overseas was a satisfying experience on both professional and personal levels.

When he returned to the States, he continued to climb the ranks in the company—to deputy GC to VP of audit and risk management and eventually to the top legal role in 2014.

One of the first changes he made as top lawyer, he said, was to “embed the legal department into the business.” For instance, he noticed that all of Michelin's legal department sat together in the company's North American headquarters. He soon changed that so the lawyers moved to their respective business units.

“That allowed them to be more responsive and educated in the business context,” Sanders said. “They were sitting with their clients instead of their colleagues.”

Over the years, as a general counsel, Sanders said that other companies and firms reached out with job opportunities, but Nelson Mullins was the only firm he has seriously considered. He expects that Michelin will continue to be a client of the firm with his job change.

“We are so pleased to have Dan come back to Nelson Mullins,” said Nelson Mullins managing partner Jim Lehman, in the announcement of Sanders' move Tuesday. “His experience is deep and wide and will help us serve clients by giving us keen insight into the legal and business problems facing the needs of today's businesses.”

Michelin was not immediately available to comment. The company has not publicly announced who Sanders' replacement as GC will be.