About

Philippe Jutard has put in place mechanisms that enable legal to be at the heart of Compagnie des Alpes, providing swift and homogenous guidance to all entities and departments ‘without having to reinvent the wheel each time’. Jutard has a diversified background across a variety of sectors: working in advertisement for five years, oil and gas for over 10 years and now in leisure, travel and tourism for over 10 years. This plethora of experience allow him to combat the different legal requirements of a ski resort operator like Compagnie des Alpes; from private law covering their involvement in leisure parks to public law and public service delegations under which all ski resorts operate. ‘If outside counsels are specialists in one field, the difficulty for an in-house lawyer is to be competent in all fields of law’. His most celebrated achievement at Compagnie des Alpes came during the handling of a 45% acquisition of Futuroscope Park that was handled in conjunction with the director of strategy. Jutard’s advice to developing legal departments is that ‘reporting directly to the president of the company is a key element of success for a legal department that can intervene upstream, but it is also a major challenge and implies being concise, precise and going straight to the key points and not into the technicalities’.