Don McGowan is the Chief Legal Officer and Business Affairs of The Pokémon Company International, Inc., where he and his team oversee all legal and business affairs activities for the Pokémon property.

Recent projects for the company have included the launch of Pokémon GO and the negotiation of a feature film deal with Legendary Pictures. Prior to Pokémon, Don was the lead attorney for Microsoft Game Studios, Microsoft’s Xbox and PC games division. Before that he was in Microsoft’s security and cryptography legal team where he worked on all international security and encryption issues for the company, and before that he was a litigator in Montreal, Canada. Don is a graduate of McGill University in Montreal for law school, graduate school (environmental science), and undergraduate studies (philosophy and theology). He is married with a 16-year-old stepdaughter and lives just outside of Seattle, Washington