How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?   

Crisis anticipation is key to ensure the organisation’s resilience. My strategy in that matter is first to structure the legal and compliance departments and processes so that they are always agile and able to adapt in any circumstance. Then, to support the definition of crisis management plans adapted to each function and business line, keeping in mind the desired business outcomes and the necessity for the Group to keep the ability to address client demand post-crisis. Legal is notably working to develop a technology/AI leverage allowing data visualisation to help making informed business and legal decisions.

What are the most significant cases and transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?   

The Vallourec legal and compliance team is involved not only in securing the group’s operational activities, but also in supporting all group corporate functions and ensuring, as a business partner and a solution provider, consistency throughout the chain to deploy the group’s strategy. If contracting, litigation and day-to-day business are key and constitute the most part of the legal team’s activities, we are  also actors of the group’s transformation as part of the New Vallourec Plan and have been able, in less than a year and with limited resources, to remodel the group procedures to secure the operations, to define together with operational teams and to deploy new business models to develop group’s activities and support the value over volume strategy, to negotiate the group refinancing (Bonds, RCF, ABL and PGE) together with the treasury team, and to onboard a new reference shareholder.

What strategic priorities are guiding you and your team in 2024?   

2024 is focused on innovation to support the group’s operational teams and to enhance the resilience, agility and efficiency of the legal and compliance functions, to support efficiently the group’s resilience strategy.

We are digitalising and automating all our processes, from corporate governance to contracts. Gen AI is a game changer, and we are working on developing an edge-cutting solution to not only automate contracts but also automatise the constitution of a legal knowledge database, facilitate the review of contracts for legal team members, and automate reporting and approval forms as well as a risk scoring of each contract. This solution will allow a better knowledge sharing between the legal teams in the regions, a more informed decision-making by legal team members based on the history of client relationships, a faster and more efficient contractual review, a more consistent reporting and control of the group risks based on defined KPIs. It will also help tailoring trainings for operational teams based on identified recurring risks.

Another priority of the group’s strategy is developing the New Energies business line, and the legal team is working on the appropriate corporate structure, risk assessment and contracting principles.