Team size: Over 1000

Can you tell us a little about your significant accomplishments over the last few years, as a team or by yourself?

The legal function of Société Générale has achieved a large number of accomplishments over the last years since my appointment as group general counsel.

To cope with an increasingly complex regulatory environment and the increased demands of our partners, the legal function is implementing an ambitious transformation plan: the Legal Transformation Strategic Plan or “Legal TSP.” This strategic program for our sector aims to improve our performance, the control of our risks and the visibility of our function.

The cornerstone of the TSP is the Legal MarketPlace (“LMP”) project. Launched in 2020, the LMP is a portal that allows all group employees to either request legal support through assistance, request forms, or to directly access all the legal knowledge made available to our teams globally.

The LMP concentrates a large number of legal documents in a single place and is extremely easy to use. It is intuitive and creates the connection between the business user and the specific legal team they need, according to the type of request made. This unique channel centralises all the actions related to the processing of a legal file in one place – including the follow-up of the initial request, the tracking of the exchanges between the various team members, and the ability to attach documents.

Since its launch, the LMP has been updated regularly to improve its content and its usability. We accelerated the deployment of the LMP throughout 2022 to legal teams and their internal partners, and the use of the tool has grown significantly. Since Q2 of 2022, the LMP covers 27 legal teams and has recorded more than 8300 unique visitors from across the business per month. The direct access to legal knowledge is currently structured in 18 categories and contains more than 950 documents, and 10 categories of assistance requests in 27 formats This year will be mainly devoted to enhancing the interoperability with other SG technical tools in our transformation program. The ultimate goal of the LMP is that every user, whether a lawyer or business partner, wherever they are located in the world, to be able to navigate in an interconnected universe, with an operational view of their files and of the actions taken or in progress by all the involved stakeholders.

What are the biggest risks your industry is facing now and how are you preparing your team to deal with this?

A significant risk in the banking industry is the relentless growth and increasing complexity of regulation. This growth reflects the challenges of our era with regulators busy legislating on matters as diverse as environmental and social responsibility, modern technologies and data, cybersecurity, data protection and cloud computing, and blockchain technology. The legal function monitors all legislative developments and advises the bank on how to navigate the risks to comply with any new legislation.