About

Bouygues Telecom, part of the Bouygues construction and media conglomerate, has had considerable success in the last few years. Reporting revenues of €4.5bn in 2015, the telecommunications company has made significant impact across its range of services: increasing its number of mobile customers, improving 4G penetration and continuing its steady growth in the fixed broadband market. The Bouygues Telecom legal team, which consists of 30 lawyers and two non-lawyers, is led by group general counsel Arnauld van Eeckhout. Since taking the role, van Eeckhout has aimed to align the capability of the team with the developments within the French telecoms market. Indeed, Clémentine Baldon, head of competition law and compliance, described the legal department as having ‘a culture of excellence, high commitment, proactivity and creativity’ – exactly in line with the company’s approach to its 14 million customers in France. Baldon believes that the team’s creativity and proactivity is evident in both its processes and its level of competence. For example, the adoption of ‘collaborative tools’ and developing ‘a digital legal community’, has ‘reinforced the lawyers’ reactivity and transversal skills’, according to Baldon. The French telecoms market has been under scrutiny in recent years, with changes in the competition and regulatory environment meaning that the legal team has been active in a number of important matters. Baldon says that the Bouygues Telecom legal team has attempted to overcome challenges by ‘increasing and widening the skills and competences of every lawyer of the team, by a simplification of our processes and by focusing on cases presenting high value added for the company’. It has become clear that the legal team is more important than ever, as the senior management has begun to ‘rely on the legal team to mitigate legal risk, to accompany and find an appropriate way to implement every important operation and negotiate strategic agreements; and to protect the company’s rights and assets through litigation if need be’. The depth in the quality of the legal team is illustrated by having two representatives in the 2016 edition of the GC Powerlist: Arnauld van Eeckhout, group general counsel, and Clémentine Baldon, head of competition law and compliance.