Unilever, one of the world's largest consumer goods companies, has chosen Barcelona to install a global center that will provide legal services to all the subsidiaries of the multinational.The hublegal, denominated internally asPowerhouse Legal, will be located at the corporate headquarters of the Spanish subsidiary of the group, located in Viladecans. The company has already started the selection process to incorporate lawyers into this new center, which could eventually employ a hundred people. The group, manufacturer of well-known brands such as Axe, Rexona, Ben & Jerry's, Magnum, Signal, Skip, Knorr, and Mimosin, already has two other legal headquarters that will work in coordination with Barcelona and are located in Bangalore (India) and Mexico City. "The implementation ofUnilever Legal Powerhouse constitutes the biggest transformation of the legal team's structure and will improve the way we deliver legal services,with much more agility and efficiency, in a data-driven and technology-enabled environment," says Newman Debs, global head of these centers specialized in providing legal services.
According to Unilever, the new hub will allow all departments in the legal function "to benefit from continuous global support," delivering routine and process-based legal work such as legal operations administration, NDA (non-disclosure agreement) drafting, contracts, and data privacy risk assessment, among others. In addition to improving the support that legal services provide to the group's different business areas, Unilever points out that with these specialized centers, its objective is to also incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize all these procedures.
Unilever's headquarters in Viladecans. The general director of Unilever in Spain, Marta González-Mesones,advances that the company has already begun to recruit legal talent both in Spain and abroad. "Barcelona is a very attractive location, not only because of the climate, but because of the talent, the universities, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem," he highlights, after pointing out that thehubit will be located at the Viladecans headquarters, where there is available space to host the new global department. With a presence in 190 countries, Unilever employs 148,000 people worldwide and in 2022 had a turnover of 60.1 billion euros. In Spain, the company employs some 630 people, 300 of whom work at the Viladecans headquarters, opened in 2012. Unilever's offices that will host the new legal hub.
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