Sysco Corp. has elevated the restaurant supply firm's top lawyer to a new role with an emphasis on global risk management. 

Eve McFadden has been promoted to senior vice president of legal and corporate secretary and will continue to serve as general counsel, a role that she has served for about a year. Sysco announced her promotion Thursday. 

As senior VP of legal, McFadden is now responsible for the Houston-based company's enterprise risk management system. Sysco relies on the system to "manage what we identify as our board-level risks," McFadden said Friday in an interview. 

"It's part of both our board reporting looking up procedure as well as how we manage risks within the organization," she added. 

McFadden recently established a team under the risk management system with members of the firm's legal and compliance department who are developing a global framework for Sysco's environment, health and safety programs. 

"We've done some reorganization. I historically had ethics and compliance and we split up the roles from sort of a traditional ethics and compliance function," McFadden said. "We've now added a global environmental health and safety role as well as a global operational risk and business continuity role." 

Sysco operates a worldwide network of more than 320 distribution facilities. As the company's global expansion has accelerated in the past few years, Sysco determined "that we didn't have anyone sort of looking across the jurisdictions in which we operate," McFadden said.  

"We had been really leveraging our U.S. resources in a way that was a bit unfair to them because we have a very large U.S. business and we needed a small group to really look at things and build out a global framework for those functions," she added. 

At the moment, the risk management team members are communicating on a nearly "hourly basis," according to McFadden. 

"We've just got a lot going on," she said. 

A spokeswoman for the company said Sysco was "not commenting, generally speaking, right now around the COVID-19 outbreak. But the team is coordinating closely on those and many other issues."

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