Team size: circa 30 people

Can you tell us a little about your significant accomplishments over the last few years, as a team or by yourself?

I am in charge of change to government mattters like the appointment of new CEO, appointment of a new president and related matters concerning proxy agency relationships. Also, I was involved in the adaptation of Gecina’s governance through the creation of two new committees attached to the board of directors: the SERC (Social and Environmental Responsibility Committee) and the CEC (Compliance and Ethics Committee).

We were able to successfully appoint a data protection officer (DPO) in charge of GDPR and compliance matters, under the responsibility of the general secretary, who is also a referent within the compliance and ethics committee.

I was also involved in the takeover bid of Eurosic and Fonciere de Paris, which raised the value of Gecina €20b.

Additionally, over the past five years, Gecina has undertaken a major shift towards a residential strategy (€1b in the pipeline) which has resulted in major acquisitions of residential assets in Paris, suburbs and in other major French cities, massive transformations of office buildings into residential buildings and the conclusion of partnerships with market players such as Nexity and Woodeum.

Have any recent political, economic or regulatory changes impacted your work? How are you dealing with this?

The war in Ukraine, Covid-19 and the economic instability all around the world has forced us to change the way of work (I.e., development of remote work) and negotiate contracts through the insertion of appropriate contractual protections such as the waiver of the unforeseeable (renonciation à l’imprévision), clauses relating to the revision of pricing (considering the change of the price of the raw materials), ethics and conformity.

We will have “to live” within a world affected by different crises which oblige us to adapt the way we draft and negotiate our contracts.

What do you predict will be the biggest change to the legal market in France, in the next few years?

The process of digitalisation of legal practices will continue to form a major change to the way to work in a legal department. At Gecina, the digitalisation of the practice already started ages ago with the implementation of the systematisation of the electronic signature for all contracts, meeting the expectations of its customers to simplify their procedures digitally and meeting the environmental imperative of reducing paper. It is no longer necessary for a tenant to move to sign as it can all be done remotely through the secure Yousign platform.

This solution is highly appreciated by Gecina customers. For employees, it is also appreciated because it improves the quality of customer relations by reducing file processing time. We also have introduced a legal chatbot which is a computer interface called ‘Jim’ allowing all operational staff to immediately find the answers to their legal questions and to have access to a directory of standard documents.

Lastly our contract manager allows all contractual documents drafted from our “standard frameworks” or “models” to follow numerous circuits of collaborative drafting, validation, signature and filing in the computer server.