About

Can you briefly explain how the legal team is structured, highlighting key individuals and their role within the department?

At HUL, our operating model is designed to deliver faster decisions. Our management committee members head verticals viz. personal care, home care, foods and refreshments, customer development (CD) and sales, supply chain, finance, HR, and legal. Dev Bajpai has been a member of the management committee of HUL since May 2010 and was inducted on the board of directors of HUL as a whole time director with effect from January 2017. He leads a team of over 31 lawyers, four secretarial members, seven brand protection members, and nine support staff. In addition to leading the legal function of Unilever in India, he has responsibility for South Asia and North Africa, Middle East, Turkey, and Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. He has put in place the “Legal Strategy” (2018-2020) which is being executed by his team. Bajpai is part of several all India apex industry forums and works closely with them on regulatory issues that have industry wide ramifications.

Prasad Neginhal heads the personal care legal team and partners the brand building and brand development teams in the category, managing a portfolio of some of our most iconic brands such as Fair & Lovely, Lakme, and Lifebuoy. Shelly Kohli heads the home care legal team and partners the brand building and brand development teams in this category managing a portfolio of brands such as Surf Excel, Rin, and Domex. Ashwani Tyagi heads the foods and refreshments legal team and partners the brand building and brand development teams in the category with brands like Kwality Wall’s, Brooke Bond, Knorr, and Kissan. Amit Bhasin heads the CD and sales legal team. This function is the backbone of HUL’s complex and exhaustive distribution network in the country. Bhasin leads a sizeable team, which operates out of five different locations in India, each location being led by a regional legal manager. In addition to this, Bhasin also manages the business integrity and company secretarial teams – both very crucial to the way legal supports and enables our businesses.

Shalini Sinha heads the supply chain legal team and partners the supply chain and human resources verticals. Viji Malkani heads the IP vertical and works closely with the category legal and CD legal teams to enable brand strategy. Swati Mujumdar leads the regional legal team in North and is currently also handling legal operations. In her role as operations manager, she works closely with internal and external stakeholders to drive legal strategy at HUL.

What will be HUL’s main focus for the next 12 months and how does the team intend to assist with this?

The industry is facing a slowdown and its impact is being felt by various sectors particularly the automobile and auto parts sectors as well as FMCG sector. For FMCG sector, growth rates have fallen in both urban and rural markets. Hence the focus for HUL is to deliver double digit growth in the coming year, with purpose driven brands, innovations, and reimagining the business across the value chain by leveraging data and technology. The strategy for HUL’s legal team is to support business integration and enable business growth by being a thought leader in the industry and providing innovative solutions to the business. We have devised our strategy in 6 parts: First, the team works closely with the ministries and industry bodies to address legislative changes that impact our business. The team was able to move over 15 representations in 2018! This year the focus is on making relevant submissions before the authorities with respect to e-commerce policy, consumer protection, legal metrology, and drugs and cosmetics laws. Second, at HUL legal, the team aims to create a level playing field for Unilever and its competitors by defending our bold and fully substantiated claims on our products and challenging wrong/misleading claims of competitors. Third, we stepped-up our brand protection agenda with on ground actions creating significant impact. We have been successful in adopting unconventional channels of obtaining “John Doe orders” and serving cease and desist notices to counterfeiters. This year the focus will be to take actions against counterfeiters of key brands so as to enable business growth.

Fourth, while business growth is the priority of the organisation, integrity is at the heart of everything we do. HUL’s legal team drives integrity in the organisation through governance, awareness, capability building, recognition, and advocacy. Fifth, technology is an enabler of better legal work and that using technology reduces the amount of repetitive or low-value tasks and free up their time for more complex, strategic work. At HUL legal, we have adopted several tools and processes to simplify our work and increase our efficiencies. We are also simultaneously exploring new areas of technology adoption to be a future fit team. Sixth, HUL legal has invested in a strong in-house developed compliance tool for all our units to record compliance of exhaustive list of legislations applicable to them, including capability of online audit and mitigation planning. This tool is now been implemented in other countries also.

How has the team harnessed technology to improve output or drive efficiencies?

Technology adoption is an important pillar for any function within HUL, including for legal. We strongly believe that technology is an enabler of better legal work and that using technology reduces the amount of repetitive or low-value tasks and free up their time for more complex, strategic work. HUL legal has currently adopted technology in areas such as contract management, compliance management, document management, litigation management, and billing and spends management. HUL legal team has a legal tech committee with a dedicated IT partner, which explores and evaluates new areas and technology adoption, apart from driving usage and improvements in the current tools.

Apart from ongoing work on new technology adoption by the tech committee, HUL legal believes that our core asset i.e. the people, also need to develop knowledge on new technologies, digital transformations, and new skills relevant to the function and industry for being effective business partners and future fit. Therefore, there has been strong focus on development needs of the team on digital and technology skills with relevant interventions.