Leanne Oliver
Global drink and food giant PepsiCo Inc. faced two major internal employment matters a dozen years ago – one involved a whistleblower under the Sarbanes Oxley Act and the second was a code of conduct case involving a high-level corporate executive.
“These were very serious cases, and they required extraordinary legal expertise and wisdom by the company’s lawyers,” then-PepsiCo General Counsel Larry Thompson remembers. “That’s when I first met Leanne. I learned right away that Leanne does not make mistakes. She is very careful and very thoughtful in everything she does.”
“Leanne” is Leanne Oliver, general counsel of Plano-based PepsiCo Foods North America, a multibillion-dollar subsidiary of the global beverage giant that includes brands Frito-Lay, Ruffles, Doritos, Tostitos and Cheetos.
From developing and implementing a cutting-edge medical leave policy and creating a groundbreaking management training program on sexual harassment to winning major class action lawsuits and leading strategic corporate acquisitions, Oliver has during her 25-year career at PepsiCo and Frito-Lay had an enormous impact on the company’s 300,000 workers and the Texas legal community.
“No one really knows PepsiCo as well as Leanne,” said Thompson, who also served as deputy attorney general of the United States under President George W. Bush. “She has brought enormous value to the company and to the entire legal profession.”
The Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter and The Texas Lawbook are pleased to honor Oliver with the 2020 DFW Outstanding Corporate Counsel Award for Lifetime Achievement.
“No one deserves this award more than Leanne,” said ACC DFW President Derek Lipscombe, who is also managing counsel at Toyota North America. “Leanne is the perfect role model for what it means to be a great lawyer, a great leader and a great general counsel.”
Baker Botts partner Tim Durst, one of three lawyers at different firms who nominated Oliver for the honor, said Oliver is a zealous advocate for diversity in the legal profession and the empowerment of women in poverty.
There is a reason PepsiCo has promoted Oliver six times, Durst said.
“She is fiercely committed to ensuring that outside and in-house counsel alike provide excellent and ethical services to PepsiCo,” he said. “Her decades of contributions to employment law have improved the working conditions of the thousands of people who work or have worked for PepsiCo. She is an unusual combination of excellent lawyer, inspiring leader and splendid teammate.”
Dykema member Alison Ashmore, who also nominated Oliver for the award and has represented PepsiCo and Frito-Lay, said Oliver “leads by example and always does things the right way.”
“Colleagues say in the past five years alone, there has not been one project that Leanne has not touched,” Ashmore said. “She is in the trenches with teammates, always rolling up her sleeves and never seeing any assignment as too small for her to complete herself. She sees every team member of equal importance, and she invites all levels of her team to meetings so that everyone can stay up to speed, feel included and contribute.
“Simply put, Leanne prioritizes the needs of others in everything she does – whether in the workplace, community or with her family,” she said.
Phillips Murrah Director Mark Golman, who also nominated Oliver for the Lifetime Achievement Award, said his longtime friend is “a fierce advocate for creating opportunities for diverse populations both within and outside the legal profession.
“Leanne’s adherence to doing what is right has led to difficult conversations, including with me,” said Golman, who pointed to an important case Oliver assigned to his prior law firm. “She said the firm was well qualified to handle the matter. A few days later, Leanne called to tell me that she had to reassign the matter because the firm did not meet PepsiCo’s diversity standards.
“Leanne then engaged a more diverse firm to handle the matter,” he said. “While disappointed, I appreciated that Leanne made a hard call rather than notifying me by email. Her action spurred me to try to do better.”
Golman points out that six of the 10 lawyers on Oliver’s team are women and three are lawyers of color.
A 1994 graduate of the University of Houston Law Center and an expert in employment law, Oliver has notched dozens of major successes and achievements during her 24-years at PepsiCo, including:
- writing and implementing Frito-Lay’s first medical leave policy;
- creating a groundbreaking training video for front-line management regarding sexual harassment in the workplace;
- developing the legal strategy and putting together the outside counsel team that defeated a nationwide class action lawsuit in which the plaintiffs sought hundreds of millions of dollars in damages;
- leading a successful effort with PepsiCo’s governmental affairs team to convince the governor of Rhode Island in 2009 to veto legislation that would have outlawed the compensation structure for company’s front-line sales employees; and
- successfully guiding the company through an intense first audit of its Frito-Lay headquarters by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs.
Winning the class action case, she said, stands out the most.
“I developed a ‘dream team’ of outside counsel, and over many, many hours we thought through every aspect of that case in excruciating detail, and then we went for it,” she said. “I literally screamed when I got the good news. The day we got the judge’s decision was one of the best days of my career.”
Oliver played a lead role in PepsiCo’s acquisition of BFY Brands, maker of PopCorners, which closed in February 2020, just before Covid-19 shut everything down.
“This was the first deal I worked on from beginning to end,” she said. “With BFY, I was in the trenches from the NBO (nonbinding offer), to the due diligence, to the negotiations and close. It was awesome.”
Baker Botts partner David Emmons worked with Oliver on the BFY acquisition.
“We observed firsthand how Leanne skillfully coordinated with the PepsiCo business team on transactional issues and negotiating strategies while leading the inside and outside legal team through the diligence, regulatory approval and contract negotiation and documentation processes,” Emmons said. “We have also had the privilege of seeing close up Leanne’s dedication to PepsiCo and encouragement of other lawyers during a two-week jury trial, where Leanne paid careful attention not only to the legal strategy but also to the contributions and well-being of every member of the litigation team.”
“I blame my terrible handwriting on the fact that I basically didn’t go to second grade.”
— LeAnne Oliver
Oliver, who joined Frito Lay’s human relations group in 1996 as an employment lawyer, was officially named the top legal officer over PepsiCo’s North American food brands operations in March 2019. Six lawyers report directly to Oliver, who also has access to scores and scores of other in-house counsel in PepsiCo’s global legal department.
“We are small but mighty,” she said of her team. “I’m in my dream job. I absolutely love being both a valued partner to the business and being in a position to develop and support the next generation of PepsiCo lawyers.”
Last year, the Dallas Business Journal named Oliver one of its 2020 Women in Business honorees.
Oliver has spent 25 of her 27 years practicing law at PepsiCo.
She gives two reasons: She has loved working at PepsiCo, which has provided her extraordinary career growth opportunities and professional challenges, and the company and its legal department provided her with a stability that she told The Texas Lawbook in an interview last year was absent in “my crazy, nomad life growing up.”
Oliver’s father was a captain in the Air Force and she was born on the Altus Air Force Base in Oklahoma.
The next year, he was transferred to an Air Force base in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Her mother, deciding not to go with him, filed for divorce and moved the kids to Oregon.
The Hippie Lifestyle and Shetland Ponies
“[My mom] fully embraced the hippie lifestyle – complete with a white Volkswagen,” she said. “Then we lived in Spokane for a couple years and then moved to a commune up in Canada.”
Oliver’s mother then remarried and took the children to Northern Idaho.
“[We] lived in the woods without water or electricity while we built our home, which for some reason needed to be in the shape of an octagon,” Oliver said.
A couple of years later, the family moved to Arizona to join a group of her mom’s friends who had started a rock band.
“I remember my mom pulled us out of school early in second grade to make the drive to Arizona,” she said. “I blame my terrible handwriting on the fact that I basically didn’t go to second grade.”
When Oliver was in the fifth grade, her mother divorced again and “stepfather No. 2 came along.” Again, the family packed up and headed to the mountains of Washington state, where they lived in a 100-year-old log cabin for a couple of years.
“We had goats and chickens, geese, dogs, cats and a ridiculously stubborn Shetland pony named Rusty,” she said. “Then my mom and stepfather No. 2 must’ve gotten restless, because we got rid of most of our belongings, bought an old school bus, painted it a pretty blue-green color and converted it into an RV. It was actually pretty nice inside.”
The family traveled “up and down the Washington and Oregon coastline” living on the bus. In fact, they were in Spokane when Mount St. Helens erupted May 18, 1980.
“The sky turned black in the middle of the day, and then ash fell everywhere – one of the most bizarre experiences of my life,” she said.
Oliver’s mother and family lived in a small house next to a special needs facility run by “Sister Mary” near Spokane. Then, it was back on the bus to Idaho.
“[We] parked the bus on some prairie that we were supposedly going to buy,” she remembered. “In retrospect, I’m 100% sure we were trespassing. There was another family in a trailer on the property – pretty sure they were trespassing too.”
Oliver said her mother, who died in 2016 from colon cancer, spent the final 13 years of her life working with HIV positive teens and young adults in Romania through the organization Alaturi de Voi Romania.
“One of my mom’s greatest joys was traveling to Romania each summer to teach at a summer school for impoverished and special needs youth and youth with HIV,” she said.
Oliver said her “dad is the polar opposite” of her mom. She and her brother spent time once or twice a year with their father. After several years in the Air Force, her dad spent his civilian career working in the accounting and compensation department at Weyerhaeuser, a timber and paper company based in Seattle. He now lives in a retirement community just south of Tucson.
‘Cute Green Honda’ = Law School
Oliver worked two jobs in 1985 during her senior year of high school in Seaside, Oregon. She owned a gas-guzzling 1968 Chevy Bel Air, which she traded for a “cute green Honda Civic” with better gas mileage from a “really shady car dealership down on the river in Portland.”
On the first day of school, the Civic’s engine blew up.
“I called the shady dealership, and they basically told me too bad – they had no intention of doing anything about it,” Oliver says.
Earlier that year, Oliver had taken a class where she learned that “contracts entered into by minors are voidable.” She convinced the father of a school friend, who was a lawyer, to write a “nasty letter to the car dealership claiming that the contract was void.” The lawyer did it. A few days later, the car dealership gave her back her money.
That was when the idea of becoming a lawyer first popped up.
Oliver graduated high school as the class salutatorian and received numerous college scholarships. She chose Gonzaga University and received her degree in 1990.
After taking the LSAT, she was accepted at the University of Houston Law Center.
“I’m in my dream job. I absolutely love being both a valued partner to the business and being in a position to develop and support the next generation of PepsiCo lawyers.”
— LeAnne Oliver
“I packed everything I owned into a rental truck, and my college roommate and I drove from Spokane to Houston in the truck while towing the little green Volkswagen Beetle I owned at the time,” she said. “No A/C in that car – big mistake when you’re moving to Houston.”
Oliver received her law degree in 1994 and joined a labor and employment law boutique in Houston, where she practiced for nearly two years.
In January 1996, on a recommendation from a law school friend, she moved to the Dallas area and started working at PepsiCo Frito Lay as legal counsel in its HR department.
During the two-dozen years since, Oliver has been promoted six times, including a six-year stint as vice president of employment at PepsiCo’s headquarters in Purchase, New York.
In March 2019, the global food and beverage giant with $63 billion in annual revenues made Oliver its general counsel of PepsiCo’s food division in the U.S. and Canada.
Almost exactly one year to the day that Oliver took her current post, PepsiCo and the world were hit with a monumental challenge: Covid-19. Because PepsiCo was deemed “essential,” it continued its operations uninterrupted.
The legal team developed a 200-page document that tracked operating requirements in all 50 states, as well as the federal and local regulations.
“Ironically, we had just converted to an open office environment, so we were all used to lots of interaction with colleagues,” she said. “This has been hard, but like most businesses we’ve discovered that we can effectively operate in a remote environment just fine. As a silver lining, I think this was the push we all needed to adopt technology and tools that we may have resisted in the past.”
What, you may ask, are Oliver’s favorite PepsiCo food products? Lay’s Salt and Vinegar Potato Chips, Tostitos Hint of Lime and PopCorners Kettle Corn.
Snack foods aside, lawyers in Texas agree that Oliver has been a role model for professional and ethics for younger generations.
“While I suspect that Leanne’s career is far from over, I can think of no more deserving person for this recognition,” Golman said.