About

With 96 staff in the corporate headquarters legal team and a full global complement of approximately 180 individuals, international car giant Renault employs great numbers in its in-house legal function. The team is led by group general counsel Anne-Sophie Le Lay who has immense experience of the company having joined in 2000, and is able to count on a high level of talent at all levels of its hierarchy. Deputy general counsel Jean-Benoit Devauges discusses the team’s structural changes over the past year in terms of ‘the expansion of existing practice groups and establishment of new practices’, along with ‘the creation of internal departmental processes promoting team leadership and assertiveness, thereby ensuring “one-voice” legal input and enhanced client service levels’. Devauges counts the establishment and consolidation of new practices as among the best innovations that the team has supported recently. ‘As part of the Renault-Nissan strategic Alliance’, he explains, ‘we oversaw the creation, staffing and roll-out of practice-based or country-based legal positions and teams tasked with advising and supporting both the Renault and Nissan businesses’. This was an enterprise that provided new possibilities for both companies and highlights the Renault legal team’s ability to coordinate with other parties to achieve impressive results. In terms of major projects that the team has been involved in, Devauges points to ‘the restructuring and recapitalisation of Renault’s Russian affiliate, JSC AvtoVaz’, as a particularly important one for the company as a whole and one that ‘the legal department is playing a key role in’. Devauges sums up the team’s mission statement as ‘working as a team to provide assertive, decisive and commercially-driven transactional, litigation and regulatory support to the business’. The company moves into a future that promises both opportunities as well as challenges, something that general counsel for connected services and data privacy Catherine Brel is well aware of: ‘the digital transformation and advent of autonomous driving technologies poses numerous legal challenges and opportunities, including without limitation in terms of data protection, product liability and new trends in transactional patterns’. The legal department has established a dedicated response team which has responsibility for advising business on data protection matters, important commercial partnerships and generally coordinating legal’s response to this fundamental industry challenge. This endeavor highlights the Renault legal function’s proactive attitude towards minimising future risk, and is evidence of an organisation that proves its value to business time and again.