About

Team size: 430

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last year?

Undoubtedly, the unification of Unilever’s dual-headed legal structure. It was the largest cross-border merger in the UK and was closed in November 2020, a month before UK’s exit from the European Union. The project was highly complex. It had to be executed in a tight timeline and resulted in the creation of one of UK’s highest market cap FTSE companies – it is currently valued at about £110bn.

What were the main steps you took to protect the business once it became clear we were in the midst of an unprecedented challenge?

We based our pandemic response on several pillars. Firstly, we focused on our people, their safety and wellbeing, and introduced policies and protocols that protected and helped them in changing circumstances around the world. Secondly, we focused on our operational health, ensuring that our products, essential goods like food and hygiene products (eg, soaps, sanitizers) were available to consumers, and that our supply chain and sales operations continued to serve consumers around the world under the strong protocols mentioned. Finally, we insisted on helping communities, so we collaborated with other organisations, and made donations to those most in need.

How have you maintained your team’s cohesion when you have been unable to see them face-to-face as regularly as usual?

The Covid-19 pandemic has ‘democratised’ engagement across the world and has unexpectedly brought our global legal community closer together. Everyone of course misses the human interaction, but we have introduced monthly virtual global townhalls to discuss our strategic agenda and initiatives; during our ‘tea breaks’ we discuss well-being in small, randomly selected cohorts. We have created a Yammer channel where we share news and updates; it is used by our global networks to keep up our knowledge. We wanted to make sure that everyone had a voice and contributed to our annual learning week and an annual legal forum, so we successfully provided an engaging and inclusive environment for our global team. In addition, the legal leadership team does virtual visits to different parts of the organisation, prompting interaction with other teams and their respective business leaders.

Did the Brexit deal reached at the end of 2020 give you and your business greater clarity for the future?

Unilever operates globally, our products are sold in 190 countries around world, thus Brexit did not have a significant impact on our global operations.

In what ways do you see the in-house legal role evolving over the next few years?

The world evolves faster than ever before. Learning and skills development will be in the centre of Unilever’s strategy, so we maintain a leading-edge capability and the capacity to impactfully advise and steer the business. Take the constant development of digitisation, for instance: on the one hand, new technology allows people to work differently, to focus on more strategic outcomes for the business while automating routine work and introducing digitally enabled processes. On the other hand, it requires our teams to maintain a strong learning agenda to have the skillset to support the business that procures, sells and markets differently in a fast-digitising environment. It can require significant change management in the ways of working of in-house teams in the coming years.