Team size: 50+

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Coca-Cola Bottling Investments Group (“BIG”) Legal department covers full legal and compliance agenda of our bottling operations across 15 states. The scope of work is very broad, which includes procurement, production, logistics, property management, commercial contracts, digitalisation activities, quality and safety. Legal directors act also as members of respective executive boards, and as local ethics officers. In all territories, the legal department is also part of the incident management and crisis resolution (IMCR) team; as compliance is of critical importance for us, our legal departments drive respective trainings for tens of thousands of our colleagues, leveraging on e-solutions but also via “legal roadshows” when our lawyers attend offices and plants and interact with our colleagues face-to-face.

In general, what would you like to see change about the external law firms you use?

The collaboration with external legal offices is significantly evolving and we can see many positive trends – one particular element I would like to mention is related to knowledge management. We appreciate the sharing of information between external law firms and internal lawyers. It is a two-way enrichment process, and we all benefit from the discussions, training, and tailor-made seminars to share information.

Due to Covid-19, restrictions many of these knowledge sharing activities have been delivered on-line (which is of course very practical not only with respect to the geographical spread of our legal teams) but now we start again also with face-to-face meetings, allowing us even closer connection with our advocates.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

In-house lawyers are an integral part of the business and therefore they must master not only related legislation but also understand business plans of the company and how the implementation looks like in real life. In BIG, lawyers are involved in and encouraged to contribute to the strategic matters (including long range plans and annual business plans) but have also the opportunity to experience directly the execution on the ground (for example, via involvement in cross-functional business projects or market visits). A critical element for establishing close collaboration with our business partners is trust – we need to have open and honest communication. As per my experience, it is important to nurture: (i) a sense of togetherness; and (ii) an environment of safety (our colleagues need to feel confident to approach us with any issue they may have, anytime, without fear of any retaliation).