About

Kering owns some of the most well recognised luxury goods brands globally, counting Gucci, Saint Lauren Paris and Alexander McQueen among those under its umbrella, not to mention its holding of an 85% stake in internationally recognised sporting goods producer Puma. In total, its 20 sport and lifestyle brands contributed around €12.4bn revenue in 2016, with the company being an integral part of the CAC 40 index in France. General counsel and corporate secretary Eric Sandrin is the most senior lawyer within Kering, taking on an important role with the company’s corporate operations alongside his legal responsibilities. Sandrin leads an overall global legal team of 90 individuals, and it is clear that the team is well organised and effectively regimented. ‘The various self-contained law departments serving the brands deal mostly with transactional/commercial matters’, Sandrin explains. ‘Every in-house lawyer is expected to be an expert in all the fields of the law coming into play in the business of fashion. Those lawyers’ value comes not only from their technical expertise but from their intimate knowledge of the industry in general and the DNA and peculiarities of their own brands’. On top of this excellent level of organisation, the team is blessed with an enviable level of top legal talent within their department. As Sandrin elaborates: ‘The corporate team has been built with an ensemble of widely recognised, senior legal experts, each in their own field; compliance, M&A and others. Their responsibility is to ensure that corporate initiatives are properly implemented across the group, provide expert guidance to the brand teams whenever needed and, generally, drive a “culture of high performance with integrity”, assisting the corporation to safeguard its assets in a challenging global environment’, he says. The Kering legal team is expertly run, well-structured and populated with immense collective legal talent. This is an ideal combination to successfully safeguard and guide the fortunes of some of the most prominent global legal brands.