After more than five years as The Hershey Co.'s senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary, Leslie Turner is retiring at the end of March, according to a company filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Turner was not immediately available to speak about leaving the GC role, and the SEC filing does not indicate a reason for her retirement, though it does reveal that there is already a search underway for a replacement.

In an email to Corporate Counsel, Jeff Beckman, director of corporate communications at the Hershey, Pennsylvania-based company, said that Turner “looks forward to taking time to recharge and [spending] time with family and friends.”

Turner joined Hershey in July of 2012, and since then, she and the legal department have supported the company through challenges including expansion, suits claiming Hershey and other candy companies failed to disclose the use of child slavery and antitrust litigation alleging the company conspired with other manufacturers to fix the price of chocolate.

According to the company's most recent proxy statement, Turner's salary was north of $625,000 in 2016. In total, her compensation, which includes salary, stock options and awards and other forms of compensation, amounted to roughly $5.6 million.

Prior to joining Hershey, Turner was chief legal officer of Coca-Cola North America for close to four years. Before that, she served as associate general counsel for The Coca-Cola Co.'s Bottling Investments Groups.

Throughout her career, Turner has emphasized the importance of the relationship between companies and the communities in which they operate. At a 2012 lecture, Turner told a group of students at the University of Georgia School of Law that companies have to earn a “social license to operate” from consumers, explaining that customers make purchases based on their feelings toward a particular company.

“Being mindful of social issues sometimes makes plain old good business sense,” she said at the lecture. “Our success depends upon the consistent renewal of the social license to operate.”

And when later hired by Hershey, Turner said she looked forward to joining the chocolate maker because of its “long record of ethical leadership and a strong company reputation, reflecting more than a century of doing well by doing good in the communities where the company operates its businesses.”