Team size: 69 worldwide

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?

In order to efficiently manage legal aspects during tense periods and to align the legal strategy with the overall business strategy, I rely on the following three principles:

Anticipate: while crisis cannot always be predicted, it is crucial to be able to detect “weak signals”. To do so, I make sure my team carefully follow and track new bills, rising trends, potential issues.

Prepare: I believe it is key to put in place proper procedures, policies, and tools allowing to immediately react in case of unexpected issue. For instance, I have circulated “dawn raid checklists” within all important sites of my company that might one day be visited by various law enforcement officials.

Report: keeping alignment with the Board, Audit Committee, CEO and C-suite should never be neglected, even when facing urgent and/or severe events. This should be done by informing on, and reporting to, on a regular basis these corporate governance and executive bodies – not just once the issue materialises. For example, I make sure they are kept abreast of, and endorse, the compliance and crisis management programmes, and I escalate any significant issue without delay.

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

My priorities in 2024 relate to (i) compliance with CSRD, which is a game changer for all in-scope businesses (in particular those that are not listed such as Sonepar), (ii) employee stock ownership, with the launch under my leadership of an annual plan offering 80 free shares to all Sonepar employees with 3 years of seniority (29,000 this year), and (iii) upgrade of our compliance program (new Code of Conduct and Supplier Code of Conduct, new Speak Up Phone Line, strengthened internal investigation policies and procedures).

What measures has your company taken to embed sustainability practices into its core business operations, and how does the role of the general counsel contribute to driving and ensuring sustainable practices within the company?  

I strongly believe that sustainability is a field that no general counsel should ignore. We are seeing a change of paradigm with ESG moving from a “soft law” to a “hard law” type of topic. A myriad of new regulations, especially at EU level, are popping up which become increasingly complex, expose businesses to significant judicial and reputational risks, attract growing CEO, Board and shareholders’ attention, and require legal skills. ESG is also a great opportunity for general counsels to “shine” and gain greater visibility from both internal and externals stakeholders.

Accordingly, I have triggered a real cultural change in Sonepar (a privately held company historically rather discrete) by issuing a first CSR Report in 2022, having our extra-financial report audited by an independent third party, and creating a CSR task force to cope with CSRD and other CSR-related regulations.