McDonald’s assistant general counsel, Will Ramjass, on reassessing goals amid pandemic crisis

Having been with McDonald’s for 15 years, Will Ramjass has seen the quick service restaurant giant go through numerous changes and developments, but none so disruptive as the current COVID-19 pandemic crisis.

“The pandemic really turned everything upside down. We had to find our way forward in a period of crisis for our brand, our operations and our people,” says Ramjass, who has held the title of director and assistant general counsel for the past eleven years. “We were basically just fighting fire after fire, with such an immense change in our business operations,” he says. Ramjass and McDonald’s vice-president and general counsel, Joel Levesque, work together in leading the 11-person legal team and are in the process of hiring a twelfth member.

The pandemic reinforced the brand’s corporate culture of putting people first, Ramjass says.

As the corporate offices closed and franchised and corporate-owned restaurants were required to either fully close or be reduced to drive-through or delivery operations only, the legal team worked closely with franchisees and corporate restaurant teams to navigate these changes, while simultaneously supporting corporate staff through the transition to a remote work environment.

Many of the legal team’s goals for 2020 were put on hold to allow for crisis management and reprioritizing during the pandemic. Ramjass and Levesque are now in the process of reassessing goals for the remainder of the year and 2021. Plans to introduce new technology and new business processes for working with internal client groups, for example, were set aside as the team prioritized crisis management.

“The new goals that are beginning to emerge are still fluid as we’re trying to take what we’ve learnt over the past three or four months and continue to refine those goals,” says Ramjass, who also worked as in-house counsel at Tim Hortons prior to joining McDonald’s. “We’re really in a reflective state now to see what we can do better in terms of efficiency and using existing technology.”

Communication and collaboration have remained priorities within the legal department throughout the pandemic, as the team had to quickly adapt to working from home and conducting meetings electronically with internal client groups and external counsel. Video conference capabilities that were implemented at the end of last year, with the objective of saving costs and enhancing efficiencies and productivity within the team, have proven extremely useful.

 “Little did we know that these tools we had just started putting into place like Webex capability and DocuSign would become a daily staple for us to continue running the legal department and maintaining our legal operations within the business,” says Ramjass.

The legal team continues to support the business in a variety of ways now that restaurants are fully reopening across the country. The corporate office is also open to a limited extent, so employees are able to experience a balance of remote and office-based work, which Ramjass sees as “the new future” for the legal team.

“The biggest challenge for the legal team was knowing when to stop working because we were in crisis mode, working from home, so I think people struggle to switch off, particularly with the different time zones from the east to west coast,” he says. “We still haven’t hit the mark yet from a work-life balance standpoint in terms of use of time for our lawyers and support staff who are working from home, so that remains a goal for the rest of 2020.”