About

Team size: 500

Major legal advisers: Baker McKenzie, Clifford Chance, CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang, DLA Piper, Linklaters, Mayer Brown

In March 2019, a group of 65 GCs spanning major companies from the UK and Europe collectively signed a letter urging law firms to improve their diversity efforts. The letter was a commitment to promoting and valuing diversity in the legal profession and wider business community around gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, cultural background, religion and age.

Despite the industry’s track record favouring platitude over progress on such issues, this initiative was backed by a core team of five heavyweight GCs: Donny Ching at Shell, Rosemary Martin at Vodafone, Richard Price at Anglo American, Caroline Cox at BHP and Ritva Sotamaa at Unilever. Sotamaa, however, is credited with leading the charge.

A year later, the Unilever legal chief says there are now close to 100 company signatories to the letter, a website dedicated to the cause, and meetings between GCs and private practice in the pipeline to discuss diversity issues.

She comments: ‘The initiative has been received well and we’re going to be quite open with this. Our tone is very collaborative. We aren’t pointing fingers but recognising that we need to raise the bar across the industry.’

Although unveiled to much publicity almost a year ago, efforts have been kept low-profile since. In the background, however, representatives from a multitude of legal teams have been working together across organisations to find tangible solutions within law firms and in-house teams alike.

Surveys have also been completed to assess which diversity and inclusion initiatives people feel have worked best at their own organisations with the ultimate goal of establishing a menu of the top ten to 20 programmes and projects that have the most impact. Around 100 representatives, including GCs and senior partners, were due to meet in late February to share progress, with the creation of key performance indicators to measure progress being a key ambition.

‘We don’t have to build something new,’ she says. ‘A lot of work has already been done around this. We want this to be a challenge but not a burden to law firms and others.’

Sotamaa is as much of a stickler for diversity and inclusion awareness in her own workplace. She has been legal chief for seven years, managing a team of 500 staff within a global consumer goods giant that owns more than 400 brands sold across 170 countries. ‘We have people from ten different nationalities in my leadership team of 15, so it’s very diverse. In a team like ours, spread all over the world, the inclusion part becomes very important. How do you create a workplace where people feel they have a purpose?’

Much of her focus has been on retaining talent within the team: ‘People stay or leave organisations for a variety of reasons and we’re trying to be big on purpose and empowerment. We’re competitive on reward and we’ve looked hard at what makes people want to stay in an organisation.’

She was also instrumental in introducing an IT platform for the legal department, called Flex, which is designed to ‘break down barriers globally’ across the business by letting staff post for help on a project, or volunteer to work on a task. Flex has since been introduced in other parts of the business and more than 70% of Sotamaa’s team have been involved with Flex.