About

Credited for driving an ethical and inclusive culture at Nestlé, Mark Maurice-Jones has been responsible for aligning the legal function with the business and shaping the business agenda. Initially Maurice-Jones studied chemical engineering at university: ‘I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do as a career so I went to Hong Kong and taught for a year and a half and then came back to the UK and retrained as a lawyer’. Ever since, Maurice-Jones has become an invaluable asset to the Irish legal community. After qualifying as a lawyer he started at law firm Lovell White Durrant (now Hogan Lovells) as a UK and EU antitrust specialist and ended up qualifying as a competition lawyer doing a wide variety of contentious regulatory work. After this role he had a short stint at law firm Herbert-Smith Feehills. Although Maurice-Jones enjoyed the work he did in private practice, he wanted to have more of an international career, admitting: ‘I wanted the opportunity to work in different jurisdictions and get close to the business and saw myself more as a corporate professional as opposed to a specialist’. This realisation led Maurice-Jones to joining American multinational personal care corporation Kimberly-Clark in their EMEA department where he spent 15 years including spells as head of the EMEA legal team as the associate general counsel, a time he describes as a ‘fantastic experience’. In May 2014 he joined Nestlé as general counsel and head of legal services, UK and Ireland. Since starting at Nestlé, Maurice-Jones has developed a compliance programme which is focused on driving a culture of ethics and transparency: ‘I talk about doing the right thing. Less about following process and rules and more about encouraging good behaviours around transparency, creating a culture of doing the right thing. That talks a lot to leadership behaviours, which is something the business is very keen to improve and has given me a conduit to drive the business agenda at Nestlé.’