About

Jean-Benoit Devauges joined Renault in 2000 after spells at the Foreign Service, where he spent 15 months in India with the French Foreign Minister, completing the bar exam and then a brief spell at a Paris-based boutique arbitration firm. Initially joining the French car giant, Renault, as an in-house counsel, Devauges became exposed to a broad range of international transactions involving mergers and aquistions, joint ventures, manufacturing licensing, auto parts and components supply for the company. In 2006 he moved to Nissan under the Renault-Nissan Alliance. Acting in roughly the same capacity, Devauges was part of the global legal team, based in Japan, working on a range of corporate and commercial transactions involving Nissan’s European, Indian and Middle-Eastern operations. In 2008 he moved internally, switching continents again. Based in Nashville, Tennessee at Nissan’s North American headquarters, Devauges worked on various corporate transactions involving supplier insolvencies and bankruptcies. Devauges re-joined Renault as deputy to the group general counsel in 2011 overseeing a corporate law practice team of 25, responsible for the company’s general transactional, anti-trust, real estate and environmental matters. With Renault moving from a historically centralised, European-based corporation to a more global, regionally diverse company structure, Devauges and his team worked to develop a regionally aligned departmental footprint consistent with the strategic objectives assigned to the legal function. This strategy involved rethinking the sizing and purpose of the existing headquarters teams, ensuring legal’s participation in all key regional business and management committees as well as creating an environment facilitating legal department collaboration across headquarters, regions and country-based subsidiaries and affiliates. As examples of recent representative engagements, Devauges and his team advised the business on the structuring and negotiation of strategic investments in Russia and Algeria in 2012/2013, helped establish an automotive production joint venture with Dong Feng in China in 2013 and provided key US/EU sanctions compliance advice in order to ensure preservation of the company’s business and reputation in Iran and Russia.