Executive vice president and general counsel for Viaccess-Orca – a world leader in content protection, OTT technologies and data analytics, with an annual turnover of more than €78m – Christine Maury-Panis is one of France’s most notable in-house legal specialists due to her work within a number of complex legal environments. Since 2001 she has provided support to Viaccess-Orca in a number of different roles, starting off as the company’s general counsel, she was then entrusted with an executive vice president position and has been the head of the company’s security team since 2016.

Citing her career highlights, Maury-Panis is particularly proud of her ground-breaking work in the Pay TV industry, explaining her involvement in the legal aspects of the fledgling market as including ‘creating “case law” before creating the law, defining new forms of agreements, requesting all of us to be agile, quick and to take risks, with the end result of the business scheme she helped develop becoming ‘the [industry standard] model for twenty years’. More recently, her work in the security field whilst at Viaccess-Orca has been acknowledged as a particular point of pride; having ‘developed an instinct’ for piracy issues during her aforementioned Pay TV experience, Maury-Panis pioneered methods such as investigations and intelligence gathering, considered ‘unusual’ at the time. Her cooperation skills and close ties with Viaccess-Orca’s security team paid off when she was asked to lead the team in the wake of the previous leader’s departure.

She states: ‘We have together drafted our vision and mission for security, now encompassing cybersecurity for our customers and us and we have developed a new approach, proposing many new security services and eco systems around fighting illegal streaming for instance, from tracking, fighting, dereferencing illegal streaming sites with a dedicated tool and then proposing forensic analysis and investigation on these sites, including a direct approach to tackle the issues’. In addition to these highlights, Maury-Panis has shown leadership and aptitude in other ways, for example through the setup of a legal department from scratch and ensuring it is focused on all applicable areas of the law and regulation. Maury-Panis began her in-house legal career supporting high fashion brand Christian Dior, before switching to electronics manufacturer Thomson in 1986.

In 1996 she joined French cable television Canal+ and became the first general counsel of the company’s subsidiary, Canal+ Technologies. In addition to her outstanding in-house work, Maury-Panis has been vice-president of the AAPA, the European alliance against audio-visual piracy for the last 12 years and was appointed by the European Observatory on Infringements of IP Rights, to raise awareness on IPR within Europe. Also belonging to Europol Platform for Experts, Maury-Panis is a regular speaker at conferences and has published material on content protection, anti-piracy, streaming, big data and cloud security.

‘For lawyers in the tech area, be first immersed in business, meaning understand the business and environment you are in, be curious, be open, be simple, be passionate, explain legal constraints with simple words, do not hesitate to create legal workshops, have fun and leave when you do not have fun anymore’.