In 2007 Khalid El Hanbali joined Vestas Wind Systems, the Danish wind energy giant, to foster, support and facilitate the fast-path growth of the industry of renewables for the French market. In this ever-changing legal regulatory environment, his objective has primarily been to shape the Vestas French legal department as a genuine business enabling function. This has been done by making things happen in a profitable way by striving to capture the full business potential in a sustainable manner, within which legal has a significant input. When it comes to risk assessment – which is an inherent part of the contract negotiation – the added value brought by the legal and contracting department cannot be based on a simple risk avoidance approach according El Hanbali. On the contrary, he says, ‘if no risk, then no business’. As a thorough general counsel, one of his primary tasks has been to understand the underlying dimensions of risk and to have each risk the company encounters properly mitigated. ‘Handling risks properly can turn into great commercial opportunities’, says El Hanbali, having taken responsibilities to overstep the mere legal dimension of the risk and to actively participate in defining and executing the overall strategy of the company with his peers. His success in this role has been highly dependent on his ability to hold a holistic business understanding and to convert this knowledge into business value. ‘At this stage where the general counsel has created intimacy with his stakeholders, at all steps of the value chain, the legal function can even help a corporate organisation to break silos between departments as the general counsel is precisely at the middle of all fields’, argues El Hanbali.

After consolidation of Vestas development in France, El Hanbali has been asked to spread a similar approach in North and West Africa including in, for instance, one of the first of its kind Moroccan wind farm projects. He is also responsible for supporting the legal aspects of collaboration with many of Vestas large accounts worldwide. He considers that the relentless determination to adapt to customer and to the cultural specifics in his remit as particularly noteworthy when discussing his career.

Dealing with cross-border customers, El Hanbali manages to satisfy the difficult equilibrium where the general counsel needs to give a sole company voice in terms of transactions and at the same time, provide customers with the same business case certainty, irrespective of their project details and the location in which they are conducting business.