About

Team size: 252
Major law firms used: Addleshaw Goddard, Bristows, Slaughter and May

Diageo’s Siobhán Moriarty has long been well regarded by the in-house community. Already GC of the multinational alcoholic beverages company, which owns well-known brands including Guinness, Smirnoff, Baileys and Johnnie Walker, Moriarty’s role and prominence within Diageo expanded even further in mid-2018 when she was appointed as company secretary.

Moriarty’s role had already expanded from a pure legal function, which included intellectual property and corporate security to feature brand protection, before taking on company secretariat. She believes the role of GC within Diageo has always been one of the more progressive, reporting to the chief executive and being a member of the executive leadership team even before she was appointed.

‘Our goals are aligned to the company’s and our purpose as a function is to drive Diageo’s performance ambition and make a valuable contribution to its long-term, sustainable success. We aim to do this in an agile manner so as to enable commercial growth, look to turn potential risks into opportunities, minimise loss and litigation risk, protect our brands and our reputation, and increase our productivity and effectiveness.’

Moriarty’s team is divided into a global function that is mostly UK and US-based, supporting the business in specialist areas such as M&A, IP, compliance, antitrust and data privacy. There are also market-based lawyers supporting distribution companies across the world.

In the six months to 31 December, Diageo reported a 6% increase in revenue to £6.9bn for operating profit of £2.4bn. The company, which made a billion-dollar acquisition of the Casamigos tequila brand in 2017 also sold nineteen brands to Sazerac for $550m in 2018.

Moriarty’s team is in the process of introducing an online training tool for the global legal function called iDevelop. The idea is to allow team members to develop their functional and leadership capabilities. ‘It supports individuals and their line managers in having informed, personalised development conversations. It is used to help identify the skills we need to develop training for, so that each individual can achieve their agreed development goals.’

Moriarty is also noted as a strong advocate of diversity and inclusion. She says firms are too often insufficiently diverse, particularly at partnership level. ‘I recognise that they are trying to remedy this and that it can be difficult, but the current state is a result of long-term neglect of the importance of this area. The recent gender pay gap reporting obligation in the UK has served to highlight the nature of the challenge.’