Global Food & Beverage Company Overhauls Their Global Privacy Program

The Challenge

Our food and beverage client’s privacy team was overhauling their global privacy program. To do so, they needed the global privacy team working with their business partners to update policy and put new controls in place. At the same time, their commercial lawyers were asked to review an increasing number of agreements with specialized privacy provisions. The commercial lawyers lacked the expertise and bandwidth to review and negotiate these provisions, so they relied on the privacy team for extra support. This created a bottleneck with their commercial agreements and pulled the privacy team away from their core focus.

The Solution

Our client’s chief privacy officer reached out to MLA Interim Legal Talent to discuss bringing in a privacy expert for a six-month project to provide extra support to the commercial and privacy teams. Their ideal candidate profile included someone with experience reviewing and negotiating Data Processing Agreements (DPAs) as well as Information Security (IS) and Personal Information (PI) provisions. Within a few days, we screened and submitted six interim counsel for the role. After interviewing three of them, our client selected an interim counsel with more than 15 years of experience in data privacy and technology transactions.

The Results

The interim counsel reviewed our client’s existing contracting operations for privacy and cybersecurity, revised the client’s templates and created a DPA negotiations playbook for the commercial lawyers. As a result, our client’s global privacy team was able to get through the required work, which put them on pace to complete their project ahead of schedule. Due in part to this success, our client also engaged our UK Interim team to find a data privacy analyst who could help them get through a backlog of Data Subject Requests (DSRs).