About

With almost 30 years of experience under his belt, Adam Smith is one the most experienced GCs currently active in the French market. Smith joined multinational aerospace and defence corporation Safran in 2014 as group general counsel, where he states that ‘the first big challenge was not to “fix” something that wasn’t broken’. Instead, leading legal ‘to instil a culture of “working together”’ while developing a panel system of law firms to meet the target of 15% savings in recurrent legal spend. Working in private practice between 1988 and 1994, Smith has a deep rooted understanding of the internal workings of law firms and is therefore able to pick the right match of external experts to advise Safran. Completing an MBA in 1996, Smith moved in-house with investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, advising on corporate finance matters for blue-chip European food and retail clients. Smith began building his formidable reputation in the aerospace industry in 1998 relocating to Paris to join EADS (now Airbus Group), as vice president and head of mergers and acquisition legal affairs. Smith recalls a particular highlight during this time as ‘watching EADS, a tri-national conglomerate, become a normally-functioning company, now called the Airbus Group’. Smith had executive responsibility for the legal content of EADS’ strategic transactions, including the €3.25bn buy-out of BAE Systems’ stakes in Astrium and Airbus. In 2008 he was promoted to general counsel for Defence & Security in Munich (now Airbus Defence & Space). In 2010 however, Smith moved back to Paris with DCNS, specialised in naval defence and energy, as group general counsel and chief compliance officer. Here he is credited for the formation of a compliance function from scratch and the establishment of contract management as a function in its own right. Now at Safran, he states that the overall challenge still remains ‘working in a second language, when all the documents and discussions are in another language you have to be that little bit more awake’.