About

Executive vice president and general counsel Charlie Broll, leads a legal team of 15 professionals including regulatory staff at Nestlé Waters North America, and is based in Stamford, Connecticut. He has held the position since 2011 after first joining the company in 2010. He started his career in 1991 in government as a legislative aide to then-senator Biden in Washington, DC, went back to Duke University School of Law, then joined Hunton & Williams LLP in New York in 1997. He was sent to their satellite offices in Hong Kong in 1998 and Bangkok, Thailand in 2002 working on project finance, M&A, IPOs and general corporate transactions. He joined firm client Diageo as in-house Asia regional counsel in 2003, based in Bangkok but covering 50 countries including Russia and the former CIS, China, India, Middle East and North Africa, and Southeast Asia. He covered the senior counsel role in Diageo headquarters in London between 2006 and 2008 while based in the US from 2006 to 2010 as assistant general counsel for Diageo North America handling all matters except IP, labour, and employment. At Nestlé Waters Broll has worked on many leading transactions and litigations but prefers to be recognised for building and growing diverse talent and taking a lead role in diversity and inclusion activities. He was given license to build and grow an in-house operation and has done so methodically to gain trust and prove value, as well as build new roles that hadn’t existed previously anywhere within the broader company. An example of this is a lawyer specialising in digital and social media, as well as a lawyer specialising in sustainability. His team served as the global pilot for an e-discovery platform in 2012, using it as a learning opportunity for the broader Nestlé company and looking at all tools and technologies to free up the legal team for value-added work. Broll has also served as a bridge for continued operations beyond legal in transitional times, having served as head of government affairs, retirement benefits, executive compensation, real estate and facilities, safety, sustainability, security and other roles. As Broll explains: ‘When I became a general counsel at a relatively young age of 41, I asked all law firms to “show me your bench.” I wanted them to show me not only the key current partners with the impressive resumes but also the young high-potential associates that would one day be the partners I would work with after the existing partners were long gone’.