About

Sameer Guha joined Mars in August 2014 as general counsel responsible for the chocolate and petcare segments after previous stints in private practice at Trilegal focusing on litigation and commercial law. In the past few years, his role has grown to include the Wrigley Gums and Mints, Mars Foods and Mars Edge segments. He is now also a director on the board of both Mars International India and Wrigley India. Steering the integration of the Mars Chocolate and Wrigley Gums and Mints segments in 2017 is a particular achievement of Guha’s career at Mars. Moving in-house from a robust M&A practice (that included advising multiple Fortune 500 clients), he has worked on corporate acquisitions and integration projects for years. Yet he says that ‘nothing in private practice compares to the experience of having lived through and driven such a transaction as in-house counsel’. This was a remarkable achievement given that the transaction set out to achieve the systems integration of three factories, teams of more than 500 employees in competing roles on either side, changes in supply chain logistics, route-to-market and product artwork that usually has lead times in excess of 6 months and, over and above all that, a multitude of legal compliances given the FMGC and manufacturing regulatory landscape. During his tenure Guha has spent a significant amount of time establishing systems and processes that identify the legal requirements of each function or department, providing them with the tools necessary to deal with their issues independently and an escalation and notification matrix that allows for critical matters to be referred to legal automatically. On the firm’s relationships with external counsel, Guha has strongly driven an agenda to reduce the number of external firms used in order to receive better consistency in quality of service as well as establish stronger connections with firms that understand the business and its culture deeply. He has also worked hard to raise the profile and awareness about the legal department within the company by instituting various trainings and e-modules on a variety of subjects ranging from data privacy, prevention of sexual harassment, contract law negotiations to ethics and compliance. This has been possible through a combination of developing content in the context of local conditions while simultaneously mining international best practices through Guha’s network of international attorneys in the Mars global legal team.