About

Now structured in a traditional matrix organisation along the lines of expertise, core business activities and regions, the Vallourec legal team is led by group general counsel and company secretary Rémi Dujon. Worldwide, the team numbers 40 lawyers and paralegals and enjoys comprehensive integration with the rest of the company and input into all strategic decisions and management committees. Compliance, ethics and anti-corruption activities on the part of the legal team in Vallourec have also taken centre stage, with the high development of these initiatives providing an extra level of risk mitigation to the company in its operations. ‘The legal team has been involved in three important matters in particular’, Dujon explains: ‘These are the development of an IT tool dedicated to risk management for our commercial contracts with our customers, the full digitalisation of our supervisory board (mainly document management and organisation of the meetings) and the development of the fight against counterfeiting. Regarding the latter, we have done this by setting up an internal committee dedicated to these matters, launching legal actions worldwide and participating in worldwide summits’. The team’s core values are transparency, solidarity and caring for colleagues, and its culture is one which imbibes a high level of individual responsibility and accountability alongside personal efficiency. ‘Such values are maintained through our worldwide team meetings’, Dujon explains. ‘Where all legal managers from France, Germany, the US and Brazil can share and discuss the matters at stake, our internal visits and travels among the teams and on the top of that through managers actions and behaviours, they are instrumental in developing and maintaining these values throughout their teams by listening them, giving the example and being available for them when needed’. Dujon envisages the team having to become even more versatile in future and is gearing up the team to respond to this upcoming challenge: ‘First of all, we can observe that every day we are facing new laws, new regulations and new legal frameworks that are strongly impacting our day-to-day businesses and the need for adaptation is immediate, secondly we can see that things are getting more and more complex leading for the companies to hiring more and more legal specialists and finally I anticipate that the legal function will be more and more involved in the companies’ strategic decisions for anticipating legal risks as much as possible’.