About

Tetra Pak was founded in Lund in 1951 and has since become the world’s leading food processing and packaging solutions firm, known for its technically innovative and ubiquitous products that are used around the world to, in accordance with its brand promise, “protect what’s good”. Pål Lunning, senior vice president legal affairs and group general counsel is the most senior lawyer in the team, which contains approximately 85 professionals responsible for the legal support to the group’s operations that are located in over 160 countries. Reporting to the CEO, Lunning is part of Tetra Pak’s global leadership team and is the recipient of solid line reporting from all staff within the legal department. The team is organised into five units responsible for a particular subject matter area (corporate governance and risk management, IP rights, development and supply chain, services and PSE, and commercial operations and SME’s), as well as four units responsible for geographical regions (Americas, Europe and Central Asia, Greater Middle East and Africa, and Asia Pacific). Each of these units is headed by a vice president or cluster leader, all of whom report directly to Lunning, and all belong to the legal function’s leadership team, which comprises of 11 members including seven different nationalities. When discussing the activities of the function, Lunning explains the Tetra Pak legal team is ‘deeply integrated into the company’s commercial operations and plays an important role in order to support and facilitate the global sales, marketing and procurement activities’. In this respect, the team is ‘instrumental’ in the handling of corporate governance, IP rights and dispute cases, and other major company projects in which it is constantly ‘involved and supports’. Regarding the team’s culture, Lunning highlights how this relates to the function’s overall ambition to be a ‘best-in-class legal affairs department where the professional resources are contributing to the company’s business success, and are efficiently used across the group’. He elaborates that this is achieved through a ‘strict focus on our ways-of-working, including collaboration and prioritisation, and our quest for constant improvements in all areas, including cost efficiency, quality and service levels’. To the team’s immense credit, it has fully developed into a stable, supportive and reliable department, and a key element in its continued success is the measurement of its performance, which is done on an annual basis and continually measured, assessed and followed up on. Lunning explains that the team is very ‘target oriented’ and is set both long term and short term objectives. Currently the team’s “theme” of objectives is ICS – to innovate, collaborate and simplify, as the function endeavours to ‘constantly challenge ourselves in order to improve in these areas’. Simultaneously with its annual targets, the team has yearly legal affairs priorities which are identified and set. Such priorities are complemented by ‘special functional projects with participation by members from different legal affairs units and from across the globe’, which includes work related to outside counsel, knowledge management, digitalisation, professional wellness, and a “Legal Affairs Toolbox”. Lunning sums up the team’s commitment to reliability and endurance, explaining the team’s ‘long term professional development and competence planning’ is predicated on an operating model that the leadership team uses for its ‘long term planning and competence build-up’.