About

Sylvestre Dhombres oversees five other individuals in the Pylones legal department, which also takes on HR matters for the company and its 12 European subsidiaries and Asian production plant. ‘Legal has been leading several digital changes, through process specification, selecting vendors, designing training courses, making friendly tutorials and setting-up workshops’, Dhombres says when discussing the major internal changes the team has undertaken in recent months. ‘The art of changing quickly is a critical issue for any company. We build the case for change, spend extra time ensuring changes are well understood and that the training is personalised to the user’s needs. In particular, our digitalisation efforts have been particularly effective in scheduling and time management, the recruitment process and a new fast signature process for contracts’. Dhombres also recalled a particularly interesting case in which the Pylones legal team achieved a very positive outcome for the company. ‘The company paid sums to an employee who allegedly designed and created several glassblowing jewels. There was no assignment of rights included in the employment agreement and no “work for hire” is valid in France’, explains Dhombres. ‘The company paid sums to this employee, and the amounts were directly related to a percentage of sales of the various jewels. These jewels became the number one product of the company in revenue within ten years of production. The employee who had a management position was laid off. Negotiations for settling a dispute both on the labour front and on the IP front failed – to keep it short and simple, a sum paid by the company may qualify as royalties before the IP court and/or wages before the labour court. We needed to understand, dig and provide evidence of what happened up to 20 years before. The length of material and testimonies to gather and exploit was quite extended. Without a strong motivation and involvement of myself and my legal assistant Céline Amorrortu, we wouldn’t have been able to retrieve key material that the company didn’t keep. In the end, labour and civil courts resolved these matters’. The team culture within Pylones is summed up simply by Dhombres: ‘Have fun while having a productive and meaningful working day and learning beyond boundaries. It drives individuals and promotes team spirit and individual confidence’.