Rémi Dujon has been a feature of Orange’s internal corporate legal scene for over 20 years, holding prominent and senior positions throughout. He has seen the company develop and progress hugely during this time, having been with it since the company was first listed, and is now general counsel and executive vice president of legal and regulatory at Orange Business Services.

Here, he takes over a multi-disciplinary team comprised of approximately 110 lawyers worldwide dedicated to business-to-business services. He describes the main overall challenge here as ‘connecting successfully with the diverse focuses of the businesses’ that it serves, via Orange’s IT, cloud, cyber security and mobile application services. This makes up a growing share of Orange’s overall business offering, with Dujon advising that the function is in ‘a kind of transformation’, with lawyers who are used to dealing with telecoms ‘having to deal with IT service agreements and offers’.

Alongside expertly managing this process, Dujon has overseen an expansion of the team’s internal digital capabilities, which – as he explains – is being approached from two main angles: ‘The first is that we are now setting up an application that will allow us to negotiate contracts with our customers on a platform instead of exchanging redline agreements with them – we are now doing this through a platform that we can also access.

We are also working on facilitating the completion of very basic legal work for the sales forces. For instance, we developed a mobile application so that they may enter into NDAs with customers without the input of the legal function’. A forward thinking general counsel, Dujon is positive about the improvements that increased automation and digital integration will have on in-house legal teams. ‘Lawyers shouldn’t be afraid of going digital’, says Dujon, ‘as it is just a new way of working which will leave the simple legal work to something which is automated initially.

The future for the lawyers will undoubtedly be a digital one. Of course artificial intelligence will evolve and will learn, but the human brain can never be replaced’.