Team size: Six

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

Over the last few years, the legal and compliance department has enhanced its ability to deal with litigations and competition cases, while having an extremely important role to play in the implementation of comprehensive compliance programme in response to anti-corruption legislation and data protection regulation. The team’s achievement in this sphere have seen it awarded the gold trophy at an awards ceremony electing the compliance department of the year 2020 for France, and a special trophy to elect the litigation department of the year 2021. Our department has had a great level of success, having won crucial cases for the company and has largely participated to prepare actively the future of the business.

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

The recent pandemic crisis and, its lockdown measures, have highly impacted our company. To allow Clear Channel France to mitigate the economic impact of this crisis, our department has led the task force concerning the crucial question of saving rents. Towards this goal, we have led discussions and negotiations with cities and private and public landlords, to obtain rent relief. These have often been long discussions and negotiations, with our major cities and landlords, on a case-by-case basis.

What do you predict will be the biggest change to the legal market in France, in the next few years?

In my opinion it will be the issue of date protection regulation. Since a couple of years ago, we have seen that very important decisions are taking by the CJEU, as well as local regulators like the CNIL in France, concerning Google analytics, TotalEnergies or the irish data protection commission against Facebook, and which is likely to add pressure on European and US negotiators to finish a deal on trans-Atlantic data transfers. Companies must pay very attention to these decisions and will have to take all appropriates measures to guarantee they are compliant with data protection regulations.

The corporate sustainability reporting directive (CSRD), which is the new EU legislation requiring all companies to publish regular reports on their environmental and social impact activities, will be an important change as well. Indeed, compliance to CSRD is happening soon, as companies must submit their report aligning with the CSRD on January 1st, 2024, for the 2023 financial year. It could be challenging for reporting companies, as data collection and auditing is a complex process requiring time and resources.