Leanne Oliver was starting her senior year of high school in 1985 when she decided to trade her gas-guzzling 1968 Chevy Bel Air 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 a couple weeks later, the Civic’s engine blew up. A mechanic told her the car “threw a rod” and it needed a new engine.
“I called the shady dealership, and they basically told me too bad – they had no intention of doing anything about it,” Oliver says.
But she remembered her high school business class a year earlier that “contracts entered into by minors are voidable.” A few days later, she met with the father of a school friend, who was a lawyer, and asked him 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.
“Something clicked, and I knew that I wanted to be in a position to take action if something was unfair,” she said.
Today, Oliver is the general counsel of PepsiCo Foods North America, a multibillion-dollar subsidiary of the global beverage giant that includes brands Frito-Lay, Ruffles, Doritos, Tostitos and Cheetos.
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.”
Most recently, Oliver played a lead role in PepsiCo’s acquisition of BFY Brands, maker of PopCorners, which closed on Feb 28.
“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.”
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.”
This week, The Dallas Business Journal named Oliver one of its 2020 Women in Business honorees.
“Leanne excels by finding gaps in policies and processes that benefit associates and fiercely advocating for the success of her colleagues,” said Dykema member Alison Ashmore, who nominated Oliver for the award.
“Colleagues say in the past five years alone, and in Leanne’s recent transition to general counsel, there has been virtually not one project that Leanne has not touched,” Ashmore wrote in her nomination of Oliver. “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.”
Oliver said that the fact that she has practiced law at PepsiCo for 24 of the 26 years since becoming a lawyer shows PepsiCo has been an excellent employer that offered her extraordinary career growth opportunities.
She admits, however, that PepsiCo’s legal department has provided her a stability in life that she didn’t have growing up.
Oliver was born on the Altus Air Force Base in Oklahoma, which is northwest of Wichita Falls. A year later, her father, who was a captain, was transferred to an Air Force base in Fairbanks, Alaska, and her mother filed for divorce and moved the kids to Oregon.
Hippies, Shetland Ponies, Communes, Sister Mary and Mt. St. Helens
“[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 moved her 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.
Next, the family packed up all their belongings and headed to Arizona to hook up with a group of friends who had 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.”
A couple years later, Oliver’s mother divorced “stepfather No. 1” and “stepfather No. 2 came along.” The family moved to the mountains of Washington state and lived in a 100-year-old log cabin during her fifth and sixth grade 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.”
For several months, the family lived “up and down the Washington and Oregon coastline on the bus.” They happened to be in Spokane when Mt. St. Helens erupted on 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.
For a short stint, the family loved in a small house adjacent to a giant Spokane Valley home for special needs adults run by “Sister Mary.”
A few months later, they were back on the bus and headed 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 children 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 worked his entire 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.
High School to Law School to PepsiCo
Oliver worked two jobs during her senior year of high school in Seaside, Oregon, and still graduated as the class salutatorian. She received numerous college scholarships and received her degree in biology from Gonzaga University in 1990.
For one year, she worked in a pathology lab during the day and waited tables at night while studying for the LSAT. She chose the University of Houston Law School.
“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.”
After getting her law degree in 1994, Oliver 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 more than six times, including a six-year stint as vice president of employment at PepsiCo’s headquarters in Purchase, NY.
Last March, 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.
GC in the COVID Era
Almost exactly one year to the day that Oliver took her current post, PepsiCo and the world were hit with a monumental challenger: COVID-19. Because PepsiCo has been deemed “essential,” is has continued its operations.
“But the current operating environment is incredibly complex,” she said. “We have operations in all 50 states and maintain a nearly 200-page document that tracks federal, state and local operating requirements. We get information from no less than five different sources and update the document daily. It is a monumental task, but critically important.”
Oliver said she’s also been charged with “making sure that broader, more strategic initiatives remain on track in this current environment.”
“We’ve realized that we can’t keep things on the back burner and need to continue to make progress,” she said. “I also need to make sure that I’m performing the necessary ‘horizon scan’ in order to be ready for the next problem or issue that may or may not be COVID-related.”
Oliver said she and her team have been working remotely since mid-March and they will not go back to the office until January 2021 at the earliest.
“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.
The business has closed two quarters 100% virtually, which “is probably something we would have denied being able to do in the past,” she said.
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.
“As you may have heard, we just launched Cheetos Mac ‘N Cheese,” she said. “I haven’t tried it yet, but folks on my team who have said it’s fantastic.”