Team size: 12

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

I hold a Master’s in business law from Paris and a master’s degree in international business law and management from ESSEC. I joined the construction industry (Vinci group companies) at the very beginning of my career and worked there for ten years as a business lawyer. I continued my career in the Vivendi group, then became legal director of a subsidiary of Vinci, and then joined a group in LBO in the energy services field as group legal director. I am currently legal director of Eiffage Construction and have been since 2012. I am also a member of the board of directors (and now general secretary) of Grandes Ecole’s au Féminin for more than ten years, an association that brings together the ten big, French engineering and business schools and works to promote women’s careers and access to the highest positions of responsibility in groups, companies and administration.

Whether you are a lawyer or legal manager, it is imperative to follow the evolution of the world around us whatever its rhythm. We are constantly reinventing our profession, reviewing its contours, adding new skills that did not exist for some before, including during our studies. These new skills are not only linked to legislative changes (as that is the minimum “to do” for all lawyers), but partly due to changes affecting the sector of our business and societal changes.

These changes bring challenges but are also great opportunities for development: they force us to constantly adapt. For example, in recent years, environmental law and business ethics, such as personal data, have entered our profession and asked us to adapt our knowledge and our know-how. Regarding my concrete achievements in relation to these changes for example, I created and set up training in contract management for my group, and for almost ten years I have also been providing training in business ethics, which has been significantly revised following the SAPIN 2 law of 2016, or further to the duty of vigilance law of 2017.

Have any recent political, economic or regulatory changes impacted your work? How are you dealing with this?

The events of recent years, of which there have been many, completely impacted my work, my way of doing it, and the subjects of reflection.

During the Covid period, my job became a crisis job: like other lawyers I know, I had to stop managing my current files and become a legal manager faced with an urgent and unprecedented crisis while worrying for a lot of people, companies and organisations. I had to do research to find out if the existing texts and case law allowed us to deal with our current contracts, the performance of which had been stopped, while taking immediate notice of the legislative reforms of crisis due to French authorities promulgating numerous temporary laws (such as laws on public contracts). These changes had to be made immediately available to our internal customers who were waiting for pragmatic solutions to protect our interests.

The “SAPIN 2” law and the law on the duty of vigilance have also upset our practices and our procedures in recent years and the same is true for the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679. Even the war in Ukraine has had an impact on the way we look to legally qualify unprecedented events, protect our projects, our financial positions, the looking into contract review or price revision clauses, how to face raw material supply problems and soaring prices.

How has the increasing consciousness of climate change and sustainability affected your company and the team’s priorities?

As a lawyer and a legal manager of a team, a “watchdog” role is expected vis-à-vis the legal network of my company, therefore climate concerns have become increasingly important in our business. In addition, the group in which I work has for years been fully aware of its role in preserving the environment and biodiversity. It also aims, and it is integrated in our five years strategic plan: to be a leader in low-carbon construction. In addition, our activities are constantly affected by these changes and so we are constantly reinventing ourselves: biosourced materials, recycling and reuse of waste, respect for commitments to biodiversity, energy project support renewables in wind power and photovoltaics (we are the first installer in France and the fourth in Europe!) On a personal level and in terms of achievement, I am proud to have worked on the recent takeover of the company B3 Ecodesign, which recycles shipping containers for multiple uses (homes, housing, offices, base camps and more). Finally, I have just set up a legal seminar for lawyers from Eiffage Construction during which two subjects on the environment were dealt with, including the greening of the public procurement code.