Blog

Neal Cope, Vice President of Legal Affairs for Retail Business Services – the services company of Ahold Delhaize USA – was recently featured in a wide-ranging interview on Litigation Daily, an online resource for attorneys and other legal professionals. The interview is the latest installment in the publication’s “In-House Litigation Leaders” series, which focuses on lawyers making hiring decisions, shaping strategies and managing caseloads at some of the nation’s largest and most innovative companies.  

Accessible with a Litigation Daily subscription, the interview covers Neal’s extensive legal career, his passion for the law and how the field is emerging from the pandemic.  

“For the first three or four months, we saw a lot of slowdown,” Neal said. “Courts were taking longer to issue orders. I think everyone was trying to figure out remote depositions and mediations. But I feel like over the past eight to 12 months, it's really started to return back to normal, which I think has been a nice turn.” 

Before joining Retail Business Services, Neal worked as a construction litigator at Leitner, Williams, Dooley & Napolitan in Nashville, Tenn., and as assistant general counsel at the Tennessee Department of Transportation. It’s experience that has helped him excel in his current role.  

 “There are obviously a lot of different stakeholders on projects we'd be working on in construction defect cases,” Neal said. “I think there are parallels in that for what we do in our corporate legal department strategy. A lot of times we can't tell the business what direction they have to go. You have to build that consensus on the right outcome.” 

Neal also discussed a recent move to bring together the company’s in-house regulatory and litigation teams under a single umbrella – a move he says helped eliminate the need for associates to do the same task twice and gave them more freedom.  

“Business doesn't align the way our practice groups do along neat little boxes,” he said. “We wanted to empower our folks to work with the business. That might mean working in an area where you don't have as much experience as somebody else, but you're handling the matter, you know who to go to if you need help, and to really push to grow and support the business.” 

You can find the full interview here.