Team size: 35+

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Our legal team has been actively engaged in various significant developments over the last year. Below are the key highlights:

Growth and development projects: These projects have included the establishment of new offices and legal entities, expansion into new regions, and the implementation of innovative strategies to drive growth and profitability. For example, we have opened a new office in Oakland County, Michigan, United States, joining an established North American network of eight locations across the USA, Canada and Mexico, providing digital, engineering and consulting services to the aerospace and automotive industries.

Corporate restructuring and simplification of legal entities: We have successfully undertaken initiatives to restructure our corporate structure and simplify our legal entity scheme (for example, in Portugal, Switzerland, and Spain). These efforts have improved operational efficiency, enhanced risk management, and streamlined decision-making processes and costs.

Negotiation of new deals: Our team has been instrumental in negotiating and finalising several significant deals for the Group, enabling us to expand our market presence. Some of these transactions have involved strategic partnerships.

Design and implementation of our Innovation and IP Process: We have dedicated substantial resources to design and implement our innovation & IP process within our organisation, considering current trends and changes. This initiative, coupled with mandatory e-learning on OSS and AI, has fostered a culture of creativity and continuous improvement, resulting in better protection and recognition of employees’ creativity and innovation, cutting-edge products and services that meet the evolving needs of our customers.

Streamline digitalisation of our processes, tools and materials: As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance operational efficiency, we have been actively working on digitalising our internal processes and tools, such as escalation process, corporate tools, and legal watch. We have also reinforced our Legal Ops with a dedicated team. We have recently worked and revamped a ‘user-friendly approach’ to our group contracting policy, our authority and signing matrix, and developed guidelines on IP. All these initiatives ensure better protection, consistency and compliance in our contractual agreements, mitigate legal risks and optimise our bids and procurement processes. Those also enable the team to focus on high-value-added tasks (as some of the aforementioned ones).

How do you see the general counsel role evolving in France over the next five-ten years?

We have observed the rapid changes to business environments and societal norms, coupled with the progression of technology and the stresses of managing risk in uncertain times (the pandemic and the Ukraine war are some examples).

From my point of view, the general counsel role will continue to evolve to become more and more the trusted and strategic partner in the organisation to help strategise and execute the business and corporation goals. The general counsel has definitively a key role to play in addressing strategic and proactive legal and business challenges to come. This will require the general counsel to adapt their leadership style, collaborating effectively across the organisation and with stakeholders, but also when leading their team. Expertise is and will remain crucial, but in this new context, building a good mix of leadership capabilities and styles to have a solid and resilient legal team is even more important.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this?

For me, it is important to work with external lawyers who share the company’s values (courage, excellence, collaboration, respect, and accountability), as it contributes to a more effective and collaborative working relationship. This is not to say that technical expertise differs from what we look for first and foremost, but more is needed. Our external counsels who advise us must be aligned and motivated by the values that drive us to long-lasting and trusted relationships.