Atos is a world-leading international information technology company, providing digital transformation services to clients all over the world across a wide variety of market sectors, and is listed in the CAC40 index. Alexandre Menais joined Atos in 2011 as group general counsel and after impressing colleagues and business partners alike, he was promoted in 2014 to group executive vice-president.

Menais has since added more strings to his bow, in 2015 he was given responsibility for group M&A and corporate development. The legal team consisting of 200 lawyers and contract managers was formed through several acquisitions, such as Siemens IT Solutions and Services, Bull, Xerox ITO, and is now fully integrated around a common corporate project. Current legal transformation projects led by Menais are focusing on preparing lawyers to better anticipate the impacts of digital on their work, for instance the development of cognitive skills and transversal vision, with a distinct emphasis to not limit lawyers’ professional capabilities to just dispensing legal expertise.

The governance of the department was reshaped to promote young talents and give to the senior management more transversal responsibilities and mentoring missions. ‘In addition to the executive committee of the department, an alternative body of digital natives has been created in October 2017 to boost the pace of digitalisation of the legal team’, says Menais. Showing his commitment to transformation, he explains the three main streams he has initiated as being “smart thinking” for the future of work, design-driven innovation and inclusion and diversity.

‘Two additional projects were successfully completed over 2017’, he says, and he has also overseen a new compliance organisation that was designed and embedded into operations. A GDPR task force was also set up to achieve GDPR compliance and business readiness: ‘The data protection has been embedded into a wider approach of data governance at company level, led by the legal department’, explains Menais.

In his role of Head of M&As, he has successfully completed more than 20 deals including ‘niche technological gems’ as well as established industry players. Menais is a member and former vice-president of Cercle Montesquieu and the French Association of IT Lawyers. He is also a lecturer at HEC and Sciences Po Paris.