About

Can you briefly explain how the legal team is structured?

Jahnavi Ravindranath manages the global in-house centres of Anheuser Busch InBev (AB InBev), the Global Capability Center (GCC) and Growth Analytics Center (GAC) which have a collective headcount of over 2,000. The legal and compliance team is lean but highly impactful and is structured based on practice areas. Two lawyers provide direct support to the centers and the other two lawyers support the procurement shared legal services.

Legal counsel, Vivek Bajoria works on internal relations (employment law), IT and telecom, data protection, contracts and litigation. The company secretary and legal counsel look after corporate secretarial, corporate governance, CSR and compliance matters whilst legal counsel Arif Hasnuhena handles contract reviews, legal research and contract management.

What are the most significant cases and/or transactions that your legal team has been involved with in the last two years?

AB InBev, the world’s largest brewer and one of the top ten FMCG companies in the world, entered India with a dream to establish their operations a few years ago and I joined as the sixth employee with a clear mandate to lead the legal and compliance function and turn this dream into a reality. The legal team has played an instrumental role in establishing the operations and scaling the business in the last two years. Further, AB InBev partnered with Accenture in a unique hybrid delivery model for a span of three years and the team over saw this transaction as well as the successful transition of over 1,000 employees to AB InBev on March 2018. We also had the opportunity to establish a cutting edge Growth Analytics Center (GAC), which houses over 200 data scientists from premier institutes such as the IIT’s, Indian Statistical Institute and Madras School of Economics. It has been included in the “10 best firms in India for Data Scientists to work for – 2019”. Collectively these have been huge milestones for AB InBev and the legal team.

How has the team harnessed technology to improve output or drive efficiencies?

As a leader one of my main goals has been to drive operational excellence and transformation in our legal department. Some examples are the use of automated compliance tools and dashboards built with Power BI.

Can you sum up the team culture/ethos? Giving some information afterwards about how this is developed.

The culture at AB InBev worldwide is truly unique as it is built on a strong foundation of ownership, informality, transparency and candour. We believe our people are our greatest strength and work towards motivating them.
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