Consumer Products
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Consumer product companies are increasingly facing challenging times, at the junction of rapidly evolving technologies, disrupting trends, changing consumer preferences and economic uncertainty. Whether you are a supplier, investor, regulator or other stakeholder, CMS has consumer products experts on hand to help.
Advising consumer goods brands and key stakeholders
As a player in the consumer products sector, you face a myriad of challenges such as globalisation and digitalisation, environmental and health concerns, supply chain management, consumer and media pressure, growing retailer buyer power, the rise of online selling, and counterfeiting. These place new demands on your management and business strategy and also drive the need for legal advice.
As leaders in consumer products law, we help companies create, deliver, and sell their goods, protecting their innovation and market position every step of the way. Our clients include top FMCG, fashion & luxury, household goods, and food and beverage companies, as well as retailers.
Bringing specialist knowledge to the table
Food & Beverage
The CMS team brings together specialist lawyers advising on everything from food law to product liability, contamination and recall, new product launches, labelling, advertising, marketing and promotions, intellectual property (IP) and brand protection, commercial contracts, environmental and health and safety issues, and complex M&A and finance transactions.
Fashion & Luxury
Our practice helps fashion brands to source, create, protect and exploit their wares through an ever-increasing number of retail channels. The team combines our award-winning IP, corporate, real estate and other practices to provide a one-stop-shop to both high-street and high-fashion icons.
Electronics & Households
Our clients benefit from expert advice, from brand management and IP through to advertising, product liability, distribution, competition, disputes, environmental and waste issues, financing and M&A.
Responding to unprecedented times
Faced with such a tough environment, businesses need advisors like CMS. We advise businesses across the whole sector and can help, whether you are consolidating or expanding, acquiring or restructuring, reinforcing your defences or seeking new opportunities. We can also help you negotiate – or renegotiate – financing or raise new equity capital. No matter what the challenge, we are here as legal advisers and business partners, helping you mitigate risk, benefit from innovation and find new ways to succeed.
Please reach out to any of our Consumer Products expert teams should you have an issue to explore.
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Legal experts for Consumer Products
Highlighted experience
Case studies
Our client had to complete a crucial compliance exercise linked to advertising claims for its leading international shampoo brand. To make claims globally, the client had to understand specific local compliance requirements across multiple countries, as well as organise and co-ordinate evidence collection in each of these jurisdictions. This was a highly time-intensive, complex and expensive task that was too large for the in-house team.
CMS designed a bespoke and cost-effective to solution to complete this project on time, under budget and with a tailored combination of AI, project management and a bespoke online solution:
- Regulatory and compliance advice: delivered by CMS legal experts across all jurisdictions;
- Tech innovation in action: we used CMS Evidence, our own AI, to review large volumes of documents;
- Process and project management: CMS designed the whole process from start to finish, collected and stored all of the evidence centrally in the event of a claim, and reported regularly on status and progress to the global marketing and legal lead for the brand;
- Alternative legal resource deployed: 65 paralegals from the CMS Legal Services Unit provided full process and administration support;
- Launch and training: Our team liaised with the legal and marketing teams around the world, providing them with support on the agreed process (templates, education sessions and an online portal)
Our client is a household name retailer, domiciled in Asia but with an ambitious programme of expansion in Europe. A key part of this programme is a significant expansion of their e-commerce offering from six to 28 European jurisdictions.
For the 22 new jurisdictions, they engaged us to:
- Report on notable cases in which consumers had taken action against a retailer for breach of e-commerce rules, and on the courts and enforcement authorities’ attitude to such breaches;
- Review the website terms and conditions of sale and the privacy policy and comment on inconsistencies with local law;
- Advise on changes required to conform with local law. CMS was an ideal partner in this matter because of our Europe-wide reach; our local e-commerce experts and our ability to advise on a continent-wide basis meant we could advise in every jurisdiction required.
The matter was co-ordinated from London where we have huge experience of managing multi-jurisdictional e-commerce matters. From London we offered our client a single point of contact, while ensuring that the efforts of lawyers around Europe were focused on the same result. We provided each jurisdiction with a set of focused questions, approved by our client, and clear, concise instructions on how to respond. We worked with them on a day-to-day basis to ensure that their work output was consistent. Once we had received the responses, we reviewed them in depth, amending them and seeking clarification where necessary, before consolidating the advice into a single, user friendly report
Consumer Products Insights
Local market knowledge. Global outlook
We provide future-facing legal advice to help your organisation thrive. Combining local market knowledge and a global perspective, and with lawyers in locations worldwide, your organisation benefits from the expertise it needs, even across borders.
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