Partner Perspectives: A day at Coca-Cola : Crafting legal solutions in a changing landscape

Role and Team Structure: Kateryna Marchenko leads the Coca-Cola HBC legal team for Ukraine, Armenia, and Moldova, emphasising a partnership approach rather than a support-only function. Her team includes dedicated legal counsels across regions, with external support in Moldova, and a focus on internal development for future leaders.

Professional Development: The team invests in talent through the “Fast Forward” program, the 80/20 learning model (80% on-the-job, 20% formal training), and mentoring for interns and paralegals to build a skilled pipeline.

Values and Decision-Making: Driven by Coca-Cola’s core values—collaboration, customer focus, sustainability, and simplicity—Marchenko prioritises safety, resilience, and clear, streamlined processes.

Challenges and Adaptability: Despite the Ukraine conflict, the team has ensured business continuity by digitising documents, introducing e-signatures, and adapting work setups to maintain compliance and support.

Future Goals: Key goals include advancing digital legal solutions, simplifying processes, and exploring AI’s potential. Marchenko’s guiding principle, “Nothing is impossible,” underscores the team’s commitment to innovation and adaptability.

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Sara:
Tell us a bit about your company and the role that you have?

Kateryna:
Yes, thank you very much, Sarah, for inviting me. My name is Kateryna Marchenko and I’m the legal director of the Ukrainian Armenian Moldova business unit of the Coca-Cola Heading bottling company. I joined the company back in 2015 and have around 10 years of experience at legal firms in Ukraine. Before that I joined the company as a legal counsel and but very soon I was promoted to the deputy legal manager position and then promoted to the legal director back in 2022. Well, I had strong desire to contribute to the business and now I have this opportunity to and to create and to contribute as I wished.

Well, it’s not a secret that they usually treat legal function as a supportive function for the business, however it’s true. Yes, it’s definitely true. However I believe that in my opinion, we are other business partners for the rest of the business than just this, the supporters. It is important that your internal clients perceive you not as an obstacle to overcome, but as a partner to create, to develop and grow together within the business in the compliant way.

Sara:
Fantastic. And I think obviously that’s the right view to see the legal function. And would you like to provide an overview of the structure of the legal team, I mean in Ukraine by also Moldova and Armenia, the countries you oversee?

Kateryna:
Yes, sure. Well, yes. As mentioned, we have three countries and in each country we have a dedicated team. I’m the legal director for the business unit and we have a team of five persons in Ukraine, team of two in Armenia and we use external support in Moldova. So far, speaking about Ukraine, we have two single legal counsels which mainly do support the main directions in the company.

The first single legal counsel is the business partner for the supply chain function and everything that includes and contributes to the supply to the company. The second single legal counsel, he supports the commercial function, so everything that includes sales, promotions, advertisement, marketing and so on. So these are like two big whales, two big supporters to the business from the legal side. Then we also have a legal counsel who supports me in compliance questions that the protection employment relations and also has her role in the supply chain activities. And the same time we also have a paralegal who is mostly the legal department’s administration supporter, but also developed in the legal field. So she creates power of attorneys, registers, deals with simple contracts, etcetera. So we give the opportunity to develop. And besides that our company also has the internship programme to develop young talents and our team also has interns. And in this way, we share knowledges with young promising lawyers in the future. In Armenia, we have legal, legal country legal manager who also has her support in senior legal counsel there. And there we also have an internship programme.

So you see we try to develop young talents all over the business unit in and model. As I said, we have external counsel to support us, but we have very close cooperation so that all our business activities have strong dedicated legal support from us.

Sara:
Fantastic, and Kateryna, you just mentioned internship or development of talent for long for young lawyers. I would ask you to expand a bit on that. How do you foster professional development and the announcement of skills of all the legal team?

Kateryna:
Thank you for the question. Yes, indeed the development of talent is one of our priorities. We follow the 8020 approach where 80 is self-trained, self-learning and on the job learning at work, while 20 are trainings, workshops, participations in different conferences, courses, forums etcetera.
We also have in our company the Fast forward programme, which is the acceleration programme to develop and learn to provide development and learning opportunities for our people. And most of our lawyers have passed at least one or few waves of from of this developmental programme which enhance their development and growth. And I must admit that this year we have promoted one of our paralegal to the legal counsel position and one of our legal counsel to the senior legal content position in the BU.

So you see the progress is there and the results is are also there. Besides that we also provide opportunities to learn English, soft skills, have number of E trainings developed within the company and so on. So you see quite a lot of opportunities. You just have to have this far end wish within yourself and just take these opportunities and learn. At the same time, I must noted that the lawyers understand that their development is in their hands. So on top of what provide is provided by the company, we also continue the search for additional opportunities. We write articles, we participate in legal forums, we as a speakers not only as participants, we also are members of RISE business and legal associations and so on. So continuous growing is our priority.

Sara:
Fantastic. That’s a very great way of saying things. And so before you mentioned that you see the legal function as business partners, OK and obviously involved in the decision making process. But I wanted to know when, when it comes down to the decision making process within the legal team, what are the principles and the values that drives that?

Kateryna:
Well, you know, it’s really simple because values are the heart of our company and the values, the key values that our company follow are first we override, then customer first, then deliver sustainably and make it simple. And all our activities are directed by these values as well as decision making the legal team. I will just a little bit elaborate over these values. So speaking about, we override, I believe that you cannot win on your own. So we are the team that supports each other and that’s how we win together. We support each other both within the legal team and within the bigger team of BU overall. You may hear they say Coke family.

So this is not the nice words because we really feel and act so and my priority is making friendly and safe environment for my team that will motivate, engage them to the most and give freedom and well create the situation, create the area where they can feel safe and brave when making decisions themselves.

Speaking about customer first, well, we always guide ourselves by interests and the values of our customers. And we also keep in mind the main objectives and result that we need to deliver as the business. And when it comes to when we ask our internal customers for the feedbacks, they always is the latest very high.

Speaking about our customer centricity, the next value deliver sustainably well. Our company is one of the leading in the sustainability area across the world I would say. And we also keep in mind the focuses and ability part. And it doesn’t matter what decision is on the table, we always focus on sustainability. We do what is right, not what is easy and go into the last value, make it simple.
Well, you know this is the mainstream nowadays to simplify whatever can be simplified. And well, ask the young generation, they try to simplify whatever they can. Nobody wants to complicate nowadays anything. And as lawyers, we try to find the possibility where we can support business to simplify and we find these solutions in the digitalization of documents turnover in the providing opportunities to simplify processes, digitalize them.

So when there is a decision on our table, we always first ask ourself what can we do to make it simpler? But on top of what I mentioned, I need to, to, to, to notice that the most important priority for us is our people. So especially talking about our business unit is about is our people safety and resilience. So people always come first and no matter what decision is on the table, we always drive our attention to people first.

Sara:
Thank you very much for sharing this with us. I’m still going to link to what you said about resilience, and I wanted to ask you if you wanted to share with us some of the challenges or obstacles that you faced in the past year and how did you overcome them?

Kateryna:
Thank you for the question, Sara. Well, can we call a war an obstacle? Well, the within the past year, the biggest challenge for us was to organise business, all the business processes to ensure that there is no disruptions from the legal side, even when working from distance from shelters and so on.
Well, honestly, I admire Ukrainians who continue working from shelters without sustainable Internet and electricity, showing the highest level of resilience. From the legal department side, we ensure that our company has all the tools in order to provide their work without any disruption.

So, I mean, we introduced the electronic documents to Nova as I mentioned already, we simplified the processes, we introduced electronic signatures, make sure that everyone who required to sign documents have the signatures in place.

Together with our partner departments as well as with our group, we drive solution for further simplification for try to integrate in this electronic tools in our corporate solutions, digital solutions. I mean to make it simpler and more and easier for, for the rest of the business to use. All this gave us the possibility for to operate without any disruption from legal side and to be compliant at the same time.

Sara:
Thank you very much for sharing that. So the last question I have for you is obviously we talk about challenging past years. So looking ahead in the future, what are the main goals and priorities of your legal team?

Kateryna:
Yeah, nice question, thank you for asking. Well, it is difficult, you know, to have long term plans for us so far because everything changes, changes very quickly and the challenges changed as well. So we need to be flexible and agile and we are ready to be there as I mentioned, well as I said, the top priority for me is team safety, motivation and engagement. Having all these in place at maximum possible level, I believe that we can reach the sky. Nothing is impossible is my motto and my team supports it as well.

So as a team, we’re fully aligned together that further simplification and legal digital solutions improvement is our priority and top goal today. You know, artificial intelligence is one of the of the trend that becomes very popular and we decided that we need to deep dive into this and search, study, understand how we can use it for the benefit of the business. So yes, this is simplification, digitalisation and maybe using of artificial intelligence is one of the top priorities for us.

Sara:
Well, thank you very much Katarina. We’re going to close this interview on the notes of your motto, which I think is very powerful.

Kateryna:
Nothing is impossible.

Sara:
Thank you very much for dedicating this time to me and to us at the Legal 500. It’s been a real pleasure interviewing you.

Kateryna:
Thank you, Sarah, all pleasure was mine.

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