David Yawman of PepsiCo. Photo credit: Youtube.com.

After going through three general counsel in the last five years, PepsiCo Inc. has decided to reach within its ranks for its fourth, rather than bring in another outsider. On Friday, the company named David Yawman executive vice president for government affairs, general counsel and corporate secretary, replacing Tony West, who decamped to lead the legal department at Uber Technologies Inc.

Yawman has shown he can stick around at PepsiCo. He started at the company as a senior counsel in 1998, and most recently served as senior vice president and deputy GC while also serving as general counsel of North America Beverages and Quaker Foods NA at PepsiCo, according to his profile on LinkedIn.

“Dave is one of our most trusted and respected leaders,” said a statement from company chairwoman and CEO Indra Nooyi. “He has a brilliant legal mind, outstanding judgment, and a wealth of experience gained over two decades at PepsiCo, spanning positions across our businesses and former bottling group. All of us at PepsiCo are fortunate to have him in this absolutely critical role.”

PepsiCo is known to be big on ethics, and Yawman also fits the bill there. He served over two years as the company's global chief compliance and ethics officer.

The Rutgers law grad previously worked as an associate with Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson in New York for two years.

Yawman was not immediately available for an interview. But in a podcast interview earlier this month with the online business site Leftfoot, he cited three attributes of a good in-house counsel: knowing the law, knowing the business, and knowing how to “translate” the two to make the best impact on a company.

Knowing the law, he said, is table stakes; but knowing the business is “critical—how the company operates, how it makes money, what risk tolerance it has.”

And he said he looks for outside counsel who are equally diligent about learning the business and understanding how legal decisions are also business ones. That “holistic knowledge” is an enhanced offering that outside attorneys need to bring, he said.

So why have the GCs played musical chairs at PepsiCo?

In 2011, former GC Larry Thompson retired to become the University of Georgia School of Law's John A. Sibley Chair of Corporate and Business Law. He was replaced by Maura Smith. But she left PepsiCo abruptly in mid-2012 after an apparent disagreement over how to handle an internal investigation.

PepsiCo called Thompson back to work for nearly two years while it searched for a replacement, and finally settled on Tony West in 2014. West had been a colleague of Thompson's when both were top-level officials at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Then Pepsico announced Friday that West was leaving to become chief legal officer of the legally challenged Uber. But this time, the company had a replacement waiting in the wings. Pepsico said Yawman was taking over the GC post “immediately.”