About

Together with a team of 25, Gregory Leboutte is responsible for providing legal support to the Hewlett Packard CEEMA vice president and his staff, covering Central Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Russia – an overall multibillion business for a geography active in more than 100 countries. Part of his job involves advising the senior vice president and his staff on a wide range of issues, including ethics and compliance, global trade and corporate governance. Channel partner compliance programs and competition laws. Leboutte also supports intensive company transformation, geographic redeployment, closing of business undertakings, and outsourcing of service delivery capabilities. In 2015, Leboutte was actively involved in the largest corporate break-up in history, to split the company into HP Inc and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a transaction that involved turning a US$110bn company into two US$55bn dollar companies. ‘A lot of companies would fully outsource a transaction of this scale to a few international law firms, but in the legal department, we handled the majority of the work ourselves, leading the negotiations on the main transaction, dividing up the patents and teams, but also implementing the commercial separation at the local level’, explains Leboutte. As a result of Leboutte’s work, the European team excelled, collaborating with the business to make commercial decisions around the execution of the split and completing the separation in only 391 days, and implemented another spin-out and merger of the services business unit with CSC. Leboutte went on to work on a spin-out and merger of the software business with the UK firm Micro-Focus. These transactions closed in 2017 and once again the legal department was at the forefront of implementing these deals. Internally he has helped with a number of initiatives: ‘Appropriately for a large technology company, our legal team has invested in technology and improved processes to drive innovation and efficiency’. Under his management the legal team has implemented a number of important technology solutions: Team Connect to manage e-billing, Anaqua to manage IP, Salesforce.com to manage IP licensing and sales, as well as a customised workflow contract management tool called Apttus. When discussing innovation Leboutte says: ‘Everyone talks about innovation these days and everyone says they are going to do it, but innovation is not something you can just decide to “do”. For those of us leading legal teams, I think it’s really about creating fertile ground for innovation. First, you need to have the right people, with the right mind-set – so you have to get the recruitment right, and get the talent management right’, explains Leboutte. ‘Then you need to set expectations – make it clear that you want people to be innovative, you want them to challenge the status quo. I’ve made clear to people that I will take any idea – big or small, it all counts, it’s all innovation – and it’s perfectly fine to suggest breaking something that was once built. They won’t believe you at first, so you have to show you mean it by being particularly receptive to the first few ideas that crop up’, adds Leboutte.