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Involved in two major transactions in France in 2016 – the increase in Ivanhoé Cambridge’s stake in Gécina and the iconic “Project Duo” development in Paris – the French legal team of Ivanhoé Cambridge, the Canadian real estate company, has demonstrated a significant positive impact to the company’s business portfolio. Despite having to deal with changes imposed by modifications to French contract law, which ‘significantly impacted the contractual relationships in France’, the team was able to get the aforementioned deals successfully over the line. Frédéric Vern, vice-president for legal affairs in Europe, comments on the impact of his team’s ‘strong negotiating, agile and flexible [work] and mitigation of risk management in an easy work relationship with business principles’. As Ivanhoé Cambridge has expanded, the remit and responsibility of its legal team has followed suit. Vern explains that the role of legal has ‘considerably increased’ during the last few years, particularly in the ‘negotiation of the deals and in the decision process’. Several examples of this are brought up by Vern, however the most high profile deal is that of Project Duo where two office towers are to be erected in Paris by 2020, the first to do so in many decades – this caries a high amount of publicity as it has become emblematic of the development of “New Paris”. Appreciating the scale not only of the legal aspects of the transaction but the reputational aspects too, the team is required to communicate effectively with all parties including a wide range of service providers as well as ensuring the legalities and compliance aspects of the deal are in order. To deal with leading industry matters, Julien Nataf was promoted to the position of senior legal advisor in 2016 and acts as an expert counsel to the business and to Vern himself. The total impact of their work is perhaps best summed by Vern who states: ‘In the last five years, the aggregate amounts of deals in which we were involved was amounting to several billion euros’.