About

Team size: 90+

Major legal advisers: Slaughter and May, CMS, Ius Laboris

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last year?

The acquisition of Coca-Cola Amatil, a transaction involving simultaneous negotiations with the Coca-Cola Company and Coca-Cola Amatil, a company listed in Australia with a market cap of AU$9.7bn. This included financing arrangements, regulatory, board and shareholder approvals, all carried out remotely.

What were the main difficulties your company faced during the initial Covid-19 lockdown?

Keeping people safe, keeping the factories running, supporting customers at all times, including those facing serious difficulties, and responding rapidly to changing requirements.

Protecting the business has often meant companies having to make tough decisions. How were you able to assist the employees of the company get through the difficult period of the first lockdown?

We made the decision to put our people, customers and communities first right from the outset. In terms of our people, that meant keeping them safe, keeping them informed and providing comprehensive support, including wellbeing, keeping them in work and specialist assistance programmes.

We set up a much more frequent communication cycle with access to the CEO and other Exec members where people could ask questions anonymously if they wished. In the same way, we had an open Q&A session with the board that was open to all and attended by over 800 people.

Were you forced to alter your supply chain in response to the pandemic? If so, how did you help facilitate this?

The team led the incident management, bringing the right experts together, rapid development of protocols, identification and management of risk and finding and communicating solutions – producing a pandemic handbook which stood us in good stead for the Autumn resurgence of Covid-19.

In what ways do you see the in-house legal role evolving over the next few years?

Increasingly, legal teams add value to the business with effective use of data and technology to navigate through an ever more complex regulatory and ethical landscape. They do this to find solutions to problems, operate as a calm centre in a crisis and provide a voice to the conscience of the company.