Key team members: Gemma Neylon, head of legal; Julianne Devine, acting head of legal on maternity cover; Caroline Jamison, Jonathan Burden, Niall Fitzgerald.

What are the most significant cases and transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Diageo is a global leader in premium drinks, owning over 200 brands, including Johnnie Walker, Guinness, Smirnoff, Gordon’s and Don Julio. The legal team plays a critical role in the achievement of Diageo’s ambition to be the best performing, most trusted and respected consumer products company in the world.

We have six lawyers based in Ireland, who are supported by our 200+ global legal team assisting on specialist areas such as procurement, competition, company secretarial, data protection and IP. Diageo operates in a complicated, competitive and highly regulated environment. The purpose of the legal team is to “clear the path” for profitable and sustainable growth and help seize the commercial opportunities before us. Our aim is to hold the tension between commercial, reputational and legal risk, and provide intelligent risk-management (vs elimination) and creative solutions. The behaviours on which we focus as a team are embodied within our strategic acronym – “LEAP”, which means that we deliver upon our purpose by focusing on how we “Lead, Enable, Accelerate and Protect” Diageo. We stand shoulder to shoulder with our business colleagues and balance the need to make our brands fit for modern consumers whilst protecting their enviable heritage that, in some cases e.g., Guinness and Johnnie Walker, date back hundreds of years.

The legal team played a key leadership role in the highly publicised launch of Diageo’s non-alcoholic beer brands (Guinness 0.0 and Carlsberg 0.0) in Ireland. The legal team has played a pivotal role in driving the company’s positive drinking agenda and ensuring that Diageo has a non-alcoholic offering in an increasingly regulated environment for alcohol producers following the introduction of the Public Health (Alcohol) Act 2018. The team successfully navigated the company’s investment and marketing strategy to ensure it complied with all regulatory, consumer, marketing and competition laws in offering both bottled and draught non-alcoholic beer in Ireland.

As part of Diageo’s “digital transformation” agenda, the legal team led a transformative contract management project resulting in paper contracts being replaced with digital contracts created at the touch of a button. Not only has this created significant efficiencies across the value chain for commercial teams and customers, allowing them to generate legally compliant contracts in minutes, it also allows the legal team to focus their time and expertise on more strategic issues and complex deal structures.

Has the increasing consciousness of climate change and sustainability affected your company and the team’s priorities, and if so how?

ESG is at the heart of Diageo’s ‘Society 2030: Spirit of Progress’, which is our multi-year action plan to help create a more inclusive and sustainable world. Our Society 2030 priorities are to promote positive drinking; champion inclusion and diversity; and pioneer ‘grain-to-glass’ sustainability.

The legal team has been at the heart of the strategic evolution of ESG within Diageo. Some of the specific projects in which the legal team has demonstrated leadership and innovative solutions are by taking a leading role working with barley farmers to enable regenerative agriculture plots in Ireland for Guinness, including adopting practices which employ nature-based solutions to support the production of low carbon barley and improve shared natural resources such as water and biodiversity. We also signed Diageo Ireland up to the “Ad Net Zero” licensing agreement, an industry-wide initiative to achieve net zero carbon emissions from the production of advertising by 2030. We’ve engaged in a strategic partnership with the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) to highlight awareness in the hospitality sector of methods of decreasing energy consumption. We are also driving the business toward “sustainable packaging” in anticipation of legislative changes and environmental pressures.

Given the importance of sustainability and I&D to our legal agenda, we have built supplier inclusion and diversity initiatives into our process for choosing new law firms and completed an RFP for law firms to provide strategic ESG-related advice, to include the provision of horizon scanning and training on upcoming legislation.

What has been the number one challenge that has impacted you over the past year?

In addition to the above, the primary challenge for our business has been maintaining profitability given the macro-economic and political environment in Europe. Inflationary pressures, increases in costs of goods, supply chain disruption and increased energy costs have been challenging. As a result, digital transformation and supply chain efficiencies have been key projects for the legal team