In mid-2016, Coca-Cola European Partners was established following the combination of Coca-Cola Enterprises, Coca- Cola Iberian Partners, and Coca- Cola Erfrischungsgetränke. The merger created the world’s largest independent Coca-Cola bottler based on net sales, worth €11.1bn and serving more than 300 million people in Europe. The merger also brought in Clare Wardle as GC and company secretary from British retailer Kingfisher. One of her first tasks was to bring the three different entities, departments and approaches to risk and compliance into one unit – ‘a huge amount of work’. She adds: ‘It was very exciting to look at a challenge like this with a great brand and a great business, and one that is on the agenda for growth but at the same time driving a massive transformation programme.’ Wardle believes it has been a success. The in-house legal team has about 100 people covering legal, risk, compliance and security. She has eight direct reports – six are effectively general managers for legal in countries, along with operations head, ‘right-hand man’ and chief compliance officer Frank Govaerts, and vice president of corporate and deputy company secretary Paul van Reesch. She says one of the team’s assets is diversity, with 63% of the total legal workforce women, as well as a female majority in the leadership team, which has seven different nationalities represented. ‘One of our real strengths is having good people, but they’re not all the same kind of good people – we have a real diversity of skillsets.’ Otherwise, the biggest project legal has been involved with is setting up the new entity’s structures from scratch, in which the corporate team played a big role. It established a new common framework for risk and compliance, using risk reporting to look at how the business can improve its planning. There is also increasing regulation around plastic and sugar across Europe, as well as consolidating wholesalers and retailers to deal with. Technology has played a crucial role. One internal project is looking at improving the use of technology so legal can focus on bigger issues rather than small contracts, which has resulted in standard contracts being made available to the sales team to get signed on iPads. These also allow for amendments in real time, whereas previously it was all done using the traditional, time-consuming paper format. Furthermore, data and casemanagement systems are being overhauled, while Wardle also sees value in technology for compliance training. ‘These days, if you’re going to have a paper policy, then it’s not worth the paper it’s written on because nobody’s going to read it. Ours is all available electronically in a form that people are going to access and read.’