An extremely successful and experienced general counsel, Yannick Chalmé was an in-house lawyer at Thales and Club Med before taking on group general counsel responsibilities at L’Oréal in 2001. Since then he has made an indelible mark at the company, and has become one of the leading lights of France’s corporate counsel scene in the process. Indeed, as a former chairman and member of the board of directors of the Cercle Montesquieu association of general counsel, as well as a multiple winner at legal industry awards, his professional achievements have lent him a prominence that is reserved only for the best corporate counsel.

He has worked on a number of significant projects over the course of his time with L’Oréal, including high-profile M&A work in the case of takeovers of Aventis and The Bodyshop (including the subsequent 2017 resale by L’Oréal of the latter), and a significant IP litigation with eBay in 2014, showcasing a range of abilities in the process. Chalmé has an enterprising view of the role of general counsel: ‘General counsel are privileged observers and often also actors in the edification of a global law. Our own experience as well as our reflections provides a wealth of knowledge, and allow us to play a major role in the life of domestic and international law’.

In terms of his leadership of the function as a whole, Chalmé is proud of having created ‘a legal department better adapted to the Group’s organisation and challenges’ since taking it over, and now explains that ‘the legal department defines and organises the Group’s legal policy through the network of internal lawyers or external service-providers that it supervises’. As for how this was achieved, Chalmé explains what he believes an in-house legal team should strive for: ‘To be an expert in what we do, we have to be good at it, and we have to be willing to keep those skills up to date.

Therefore, we should work our way around the business forging good relationships and seeking to learn from a range of different perspectives. As well as this, we should stay strong, innovative and humble’.