About

A truly heavyweight in-house legal team, Michelin has a legal community of 187 members led by group general counsel Benoit Balmary, with the lion’s share of the legal function (82 lawyers, intellectual property attorneys and paralegals) located in France. ‘The Michelin Group recently underwent a significant Group-wide reorganisation’, Balmary says, ‘which took effect in January 2018. Accordingly, the legal function organisation and support model was modified to optimise Group legal support. In particular, we created the role of business line legal support manager, with a lawyer being assigned to each of the Group’s newly-created 14 business lines’. In 2018, the Group acquired Fenner and Camso, nearly doubling the number of affiliates and significantly adding to the Group’s portfolio of products and services. The Michelin legal team was instrumental in this, not only for legal support but, as Balmary relates, ‘also on putting in place an appropriate legal support model for the new businesses as part of the overall integration process’. A positive internal culture pervades the team and contributes significantly to its efficiency. ‘The Michelin legal function ethos can be summarised as “one legal community”. Members of the legal function work together on a world-wide basis as a proactive business partner to deliver quality legal services’, Balmary explains. The team has been closely following the development of legal technology and the impact of emergent tools on in-house legal work. ‘It seems clear that legal tech will change the way that legal services are delivered in-house, and also have an effect on the skill set needed by our teams’, Balmary concludes.