Head of the firm’s risk management subgroup, John's areas of practice are products liability, commercial litigation, international litigation, case and claim coordination, risk management and discovery. He also frequently advises Virginia subsidiaries of foreign corporations.

After law school, he worked from 1972 to 1975 at the Max-Planck-Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright and Competition Law in Munich, Germany, where he was the acting editor of International Review of Industrial Property and Copyright Law. He then moved to Florence, Italy, where he was an assistant in the law department at the European University Institute and where he helped to coordinate the Ford Foundation's Florence "Access-to-Justice" Project. In 1980, he returned to Stanford Law School as a post-doctoral research fellow for one semester.

He has been a member of the board of governors of the International Practice Section of the Virginia State Bar since 1987. He is also a frequent lecturer on the subjects of U.S. products liability, risk management, warnings and discovery at seminars in Germany organized by the USA Forum.