About

Having started her in-house legal career at PepsiCo Snacks in 2008, Sevda Aydın Alemdar has since become a key figure in the in-house legal department at the global food and beverage company in Turkey. Both Alemdar and her manager undertook the task of creating and structuring the department from scratch, setting ‘the department not as an approval authority but a department that takes part in every stage of the business form the beginning to the end’ which ‘helped us to be seen as a business partner in our colleagues’ eyes. We paid attention to walk with our in-house clients along the path’, she says. In 2011 Alemdar proved her cross-collaborative and deal skills when working on PepsiCo’s merger process with its bottling company, in doing so collaborating ‘very closely with the HR team to merge two different departments/companies and structuring the new organisation’. She also highlights “Project Naturalis”, where she worked closely with the Agro team to ‘transform the waste product of the company’s potatoes plants to fertiliser and selling the fertiliser to potatoe suppliers. The project has excited me especially on environmental sustainability’. She has also worked on the PepsiCo Turkey’s litigation reporting process, of which she says, ‘I have been pursuing [this] for the last three years, and it has given me the chance to understand the financial structure of the company and contributed very much to analysing the process. I understood the importance of winning or losing a lawsuit may change due to the timing of reporting it. If you have reported the relevant departments that the chance of winning the case is decreasing then you are on the right path. Thus, I think outside counsel management and reporting is one the essential issues an in-house counsel needs to deal with’. Alemdar cites three of the most important activities she’s been involved in during the past three years as working on a large internal termination process, delivering an antitrust awareness test and Albatros online orientation programme to the business and helping initiate a Tracking and Bad Debt Collection Process to decrease conflicts with customers and also increase the collection ratio.