Team size: 12

Major legal advisers: Baker McKenzie, Osborne Clarke and DAC Beachcroft 
 

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in? 

L’Oreal sells and distributes a range of cosmetics ranging from skincare to makeup under various brands owned by the parent company. Our products are distributed through various channels including retailers, department stores, salons, wholesalers, online retailers, pharmacies and dermatology practitioners. My team handles the negotiation of our distribution and supplier agreements, which has recently included the negotiation of high value outsourcing agreements, and advises the business on all relevant laws and regulations including competition, data protection, privacy, consumer rights, advertising, and intellectual property. One of our key focuses is to ensure that our advertising complies with the ASA’s and the CMA’s codes, with a recent focus on environmental claims. We have recently been involved in defending complaints to the ASA and pursuing complaints against competitors’ advertising.
 

What do you see as an opportunity or risk over the next six months? 

Areas which are potential risks for us and which we will be monitoring closely over the next six months include the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill, the Online Safety Bill, Data Protection and Digital Information Bill as well as the CMA’s investigations into greenwashing in fast fashion and fast-moving consumer goods.
 

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense? 

We approached Osborne Clarke (OC) for their help with re-engineering and optimising our process for organising prize promotions to consumers. At the time, each promotion was being dealt with in isolation; this required the legal team to draft bespoke paperwork each time. We were keen to improve client service delivery and decided to bring in OC on a value-added basis, to create a platform to help all parties run the workstream better. Our key objectives, which we have successfully met, were to create a consistent approach to the running of promotions across 36 L’Oréal brands, secondly to focus on business users and empower them to help themselves, third to lighten the legal team’s workload, fourth to reduce email traffic and supply a single source of truth that covers each promotion, fifth to ensure business users are given relevant guidance up to, and during, legal instruction and, finally to supply a way of tracking and measuring the success of each promotion.  

We have also created a SharePoint for the business with guidance documents and self-help tools to provide support to the business on low-risk areas without the support of legal, which has allowed my team to focus on complex high-value matters.