About

Team size: 100
Major law firms used: CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang, Gowling WLG, Norton Rose Fulbright, RPC, Shearman & Sterling, Slaughter and May, Squire Patton Boggs, Womble Bond Dickinson

The remit of Coca-Cola European Partners’ (CCEP) general counsel (GC) and company secretary Clare Wardle has been all about joining the dots across the world’s largest independent Coca-Cola bottler since she joined from British retailer Kingfisher in 2016.

CCEP was established following the combination of Coca-Cola Enterprises, Coca-Cola Iberian Partners, and Coca-Cola Erfrischungsgetränke in 2016. Wardle had to bring three different entities, departments and approaches into one unit, creating an in-house legal team of about 100 people covering legal, risk, compliance and security. She has eight direct reports, six of which are effectively general managers for legal in individual countries.

‘It’s been about keeping everybody joined up,’ Wardle says. ‘Making sure we have the local view as well as the central view.’ That has most recently manifested itself through a contract management system to standardise agreements. The team also embeds lawyers in different business units and geographies, to spread ideas and approaches across the function.

The legal team has also implemented a tool that combines all its risk processes and connects people working on a particular issue together via an app, rather than needing to send emails. The app can also search across similar incidents that have occurred, with Wardle saying it has improved risk management across the business. ‘Identifying operational risks gives much more of a group view, instead of having to aggregate local risk in particular fields. You know how many risks have cropped up, how many incidents have occurred, how much training there has been: you can see that straight away without having to ask six different people.’

Wardle also completed her first panel review in 2018, selecting around 30 law firms from a panel of more than 100 created as a result of the merger. The firms were assessed on quality, finance, innovation, corporate social responsibility and diversity, and will be annually reviewed on those areas over the three-year panel term. ‘We have guiding principles that we send out to all our suppliers and law firms should not be exempt from that. Law firms certainly have struggled on diversity, and it’s part of the in-house team’s role to push them to do better rather than to sit back and say: “Well, it’s your problem”.’