Team size: Nine

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

Having been a very small team over several years, responsibilities in the department have been dependent on the individual team member. As the headcount in the legal department grew, the shifting of responsibilities within the team led to some confusion among the business units. Therefore, we decided to detach the person from the task. When it comes to standardised day-to-day work (such as contract drafting or review), we created a generic email account (non-personified email address). Those requests are now assigned based on capacity within the team, thereby increasing efficiency and reducing response times. More complex matters or project work remain with those team members specialised in such matters. The key idea of this was to draw a proper line between standardised day-to-day advice and more complex or project-based advice.

Apart from legal matters, has the team worked on other company initiatives?

The team also assumes responsibility for compliance related matters, such as the processing of reports delivered through the whistleblowing tool or communication campaigns. At the moment, the team is setting up an ethics committee to handle compliance-sensitive matters with the involvement of concerned stakeholders (HR, compliance, sustainability, and works council). Furthermore, we work together with our colleagues in the sustainability deportment on the implementation of supply chain and sustainability legislation (for example, the draft corporate sustainability due diligence directive) and other ESG topics. Ensuring responsibility along the supply chain is a major driver of ESG compliance in retail, which demands almost the full spectrum of our services.

Can you sum up the team culture/ethos in one sentence? 

We take care of it, thus making life easier for our colleagues. Our mission is to support our business units on legal and compliance matters, so they can focus on their core topics that are viable for operations and their development. We aim at identifying hot topics and caveats in due course and provide solutions proactively. We take responsibility for our advice and the outcome it provokes. We use our expertise and experience to give apt and risk-based recommendations for business decisions.