La Lande resigned Aug. 5 to spend more time with her family in New York, where she traveled from the food and beverage company’s co-headquarters in Chicago and Pittsburgh, a Kraft Heinz spokesman said. She previously spent more than 17 years at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where she made partner in 2007.
She will start Aug. 19 at Estée Lauder, succeeding general counsel Deirdre Stanley, who recently stepped down after joining the company in 2019. Estée Lauder said this year it would cut roughly roughly 3,000 jobs as part of a workforce restructuring designed to bolster its bottom line as the New York-based company battled a drop in sales.
La Lande’s pay packages have put her among the top end of US public company legal leaders. She earned nearly $5.2 million in total compensation last year from Kraft Heinz, according to a company proxy statement. She also received almost $6.4 million in 2022 and about $4 million in 2021, as well as $7.4 million in 2019 and $5.8 million in 2018, per past proxy filings.
“Rashida’s impressive experience acting as a key strategic partner to executive leadership teams and boards coupled with her sound judgment advising a publicly traded, values-driven business on legal matters makes her ideally suited for this role,” Estée Lauder executive chairman William Lauder said in a statement announcing her hire.
La Lande and Stanley, the executive she replaces, are both part of the Black General Counsel 2025 Initiative, which seeks to increase representation of Black legal leaders at Fortune 1000 companies. The two legal chiefs didn’t respond to comment requests.
Estée Lauder has sought to improve its workforce diversity by creating a new division to oversee those efforts led by former labor lawyer Nicole Monson. The company owns brands such as La Mer, Jo Malone London, Dr. Jart+, Clinique, Bobbi Brown, and Aveda, and Estée Lauder recently bought the Tom Ford fragrance and beauty line for $2.8 billion.
Kraft Heinz hired La Lande in 2018, shortly after it made an ill-fated $143 billion takeover offer for consumer products giant Unilever PLC and three years after the $50 billion merger that created the company. Kraft Heinz, which owns its namesake food brands and others such as Grey Poupon, Oscar Meyer, and Philadelphia Cream Cheese, added duties for La Lande that aside from legal included corporate affairs, sustainability, and environmental, social, and governance.
La Lande will receive a “pro-rata payment of her annual bonus” for fiscal 2024, as well as 66% vesting for her stock grants in 2022 and another 33% for grants in 2023, according to a Kraft Heinz securities disclosure. She owns more than $5 million in Kraft stock, according to Bloomberg data. Securities filings show La Lande sold nearly $3.7 million in company shares within the last year.
She will remain an adviser to Kraft Heinz during a transition period. Prasanth “Prash” Akkapeddi, a former Gibson Dunn associate, is succeeding La Lande as the company’s interim global general counsel. Akkapeddi has worked at Kraft Heinz for more than six years, most recently as its international general counsel.
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