How this in-house counsel mastered the basics of business law

As legal director at PepsiCo Canada, and one of only three in-house lawyers on staff, Sara Diament’s legal skill set needs to run the gamut. “On one day, I might be advising on employee-pension matters,” she says. “On another, I could be drafting commercial contracts, guiding management on litigation or handling risk-management questions.”

Welcome to the world of an elite in-house counsel. The legal questions come at you, like a flood, all day long. And you’d better have the answers. Diament’s initiation into this world took place in 2010, when she left private practice as a commercial litigator and moved in-house to Tim Hortons. In short order, she realized that in-house lawyers need a wide range of legal knowledge at their fingertips.

So she enrolled in the business law specialization of the Osgoode Professional LLM, a rigorous two-year graduate program that she could complete on a part-time basis. In 2014, Diament finished the program and, in February 2015, moved to PepsiCo — ready to take on any legal challenge. “The program gave me a really well-rounded scope of business law,” she says. “It helped me feel more confident in providing legal advice as it relates to the organization. It definitely makes me unique.”