Team size: Four

What has been the number one challenge that has impacted you over the past year?

L’Oréal has set itself the mission of offering the best of cosmetics innovation in terms of quality, efficacy and safety. For many of its brands, this means L’Oréal has chosen to distribute its products using a selective distribution model. Service, product advice and the right qualitative environment to optimise and safeguard brand equity are the key ingredients of this model. While the legislative environment has significantly evolved under the new European Vertical Block Exemption Regulation, the Benelux legal team has initiated steps to protect the selective networks operating across a number of its brands. Concretely, the legal team successfully initiated and concluded legal proceedings in Belgium to stop the commercialisation of its Kérastase products by a non-authorised reseller. In addition, successful legal proceedings have been concluded in The Netherlands against a non-authorised reseller from the US, protecting the selective networks for its Luxe brands.

Do you have an example of a time when you have come up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works that did not result in a large expense?

The Benelux legal team made an inventory of the most frequently asked questions by our business stakeholder and created a simple ‘Legal Toolkit’ on our intranet site with answers, tools and templates. This has enabled the business teams to be more empowered and allowed the legal teams more time to focus on our priorities and more strategic legal work.

What would you say are the unique qualities required to be successful as an in-house lawyer in your industry?

The fun about our in-house practice is that we work in a fast-moving environment across diverse topics ranging from competition law, intellectual property law, data privacy, consumer law, labour law, advertising law, corporate law, contracting and litigation. Our clients are interns as well as board members. The type of work our team is involved in is broad and not strictly limited to legal topics. This means you need to be a specialist at being a generalist. Of course, in-house lawyers need to know the business through and through and we should be able to connect with our stakeholders using simple (business) language. Communicating intelligently and effectively is essential and in-house lawyers need to have a sound moral compass. Overall, in-house lawyers should always remain pragmatic, solution oriented and willing to be both ‘poet and peasant’.