Team size: Four

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

Over the past year, our team has handled matters across different practice areas – labour relations, advertising challenges, enforcement actions and audits by regulators, environmental and sustainability issues, consumer rights claims, and a product recall. To date, all these have fortunately yielded positive outcomes and win-win results.

From a day-to-day operations standpoint, our team has been very hands on in ensuring that P&G’s negotiations, contracts, and transactions with its various external stakeholders achieve targets while being compliant with applicable legislation. Simply put, we provide counsel to the company by keeping business operations within the limits of what is legally sound, and provide simple, creative, and realistic solutions to complex business challenges.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this?

At P&G, our purpose, values, and principles serve as the foundation of everything that we do. Summed up by the mindset of doing the right thing every time, this mantra has allowed P&G to gain the trust of its shareholders, business partners, and consumers, and has been a cornerstone to which the company attributes its success.

It is the company’s expectation that its legal team serves as one of the pillars that holds everyone up to this high and unyielding standard. As such, this principle is one that we, as the legal team, expect from our external lawyers as well – that when faced with a choice, we will always choose the harder right than the easier wrong.

Thus, our external counsel – as with all our other business suppliers – are required to complete a robust vendor accreditation process to ensure that the company’s values align with theirs. It follows therefore that the company will not hesitate to reconsider engagements with firms should we find that they have compromised the values they committed themselves to.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

In-house lawyers can easily build strong relationships with business partners by being business partners themselves. This means real collaboration with business teams and having one unifying goal. Oftentimes during meetings and discussions, an in-house lawyer and a business partner would offer contrasting viewpoints and come from different perspectives. Thus, it is important to keep in mind that with both being under one company, the objective of all parties should ultimately be the same –the success of the business, which at P&G means the success of every individual as well.

In the workplace, we often use the term “bayanihan”, which is a Filipino term that refers to community unity and lifting each other up. This term is very much applicable to an in-house lawyer building relationships with business partners, as we take on the role of being strategic thought partners that provide accurate, timely, and thorough legal advice which drives the business forward. We advise on what the business can do rather than simply what it cannot.

If existent, can you talk about you or your company’s efforts on renewability, sustainability or other environmentally friendly activities?

I am truly proud to say that at P&G, environmental sustainability is embedded in how we do business. In the Philippines alone, the Company has championed the following initiatives:

Project LESS, an initiative that aims to create better and more sustainable alternatives to significant, but often overlooked business materials. Recent examples include converting single-use laminate-based bellybands and stickers to 100% Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) -certified papers, introducing flexible and reusable point-of-sale materials (POSMs), and recycling P&G cartons into honeycomb-like wrappers for last mile packaging in e-commerce deliveries.

A tree planting activity, where over 100 P&G employees volunteered to plant 2,000 mangrove seedlings in coastal areas.

Sustainable product packaging such as with Safeguard multipacks, which has eliminated its virgin plastic overwrap packaging to 100% recycle paper carton material, saving 8,500km worth of plastic waste every year.