About

Team size: 35 in the HQ team
Major law firms used: Clifford Chance, DWF, Macfarlanes, RPC, Shepherd and Wedderburn

Amanda Hamilton-Stanley is relishing the opportunity of being group GC of French wines and spirits company Pernod Ricard, having ascended to the role in September. She replaced veteran GC Ian FitzSimons after he stepped down following a 16-year stint. She was picked as his replacement thanks to her considerable pedigree at the company, serving as GC for its Chivas Brothers whisky division since 2011 and even overseeing a major overhaul of the legal advice panel in 2016.

Based in Paris, Hamilton-Stanley runs the 35-strong HQ legal team, which is split into four divisions: a small cyber security and GDPR team; an M&A team; a compliance team; and a centralised intellectual property administration hub. But outside the HQ, each of the company’s brands, including Absolut Vodka, Jameson Irish Whiskey and Beefeater Gin, has its own legal team. These vary in size depending on the size of the brand. Typical legal work for the HQ and the various brand teams includes IP protection and M&A, although specific to the brands is a focus on contracts and supplier issues.

But Hamilton-Stanley has a major one-off matter on the horizon: by 2020 Pernod Ricard is expecting to integrate five separate affiliates and its HQ team into one larger office in Paris, a move that she says will bring ‘a greater degree of collaboration. It will encourage each lawyer to work as part of a bigger team with a broader scope and enable them to collaborate more easily with colleagues, both in the different businesses in France and around the world’.

She has won great admiration from partners after successfully asserting herself in the new role. Aedamar Comiskey, Linklaters’ global head of corporate, describes Hamilton-Stanley as a ‘powerful GC’, the likes of which ‘we need more of in law’. RPC head of commercial, Jeremy Drew, goes further: ‘She is one of those very annoyingly organised people who no matter what you throw at her, she knows the answer, she knows what she wants and is very careful about how she uses her lawyers. A very bright, astute, canny operator – she does a ton of stuff for them. A class act.’