About

Tesco’s legal function in Ireland is headed by Sarah Gallagher, who oversees a team of 15 individuals across legal, compliance and risk. She relates that the team has been undertaking an improvement and expansion of its technological capabilities over recent months, with ‘a “documatics” portal and comprehensive related training available to all team members’ making an appearance, while the team has also added to the expertise available to it via the addition of a dedicated project manager. On this new capability, which Gallagher regards as ‘an absolute success’, she says, ‘our compliance agenda has been driven by this addition, and we now have a more analytical ability to circumvent the over-complication that lawyers often fall into’. In particular, Gallagher reports the company’s GDPR compliance programme was completed extremely successfully (she mentions the cross-function GDPR team’s work on this as among the greatest successes within the department in recent months), in part due to the adoption of a dedicated project manager. On the team culture as a whole, Gallagher mentions it as one of inclusiveness and openness, with a focus on teamwork. ‘Individuals within the team have to be team players first and foremost’, she explains, ‘as well as responsive rather than reactive, resilient and possessing of a hunger to improve the internal function. Other than that’, she concludes, ‘it’s about personality. We know very quickly whether someone is right for the team’.