About

The legal team at Dufry takes pride in its diverse work force as it comprised of professionals of 16 different nationalities, 55% are women, and there are nine different languages spoken between them. Representing the global travel retailer with operations in over 62 countries and concessions in over 2,200 shops located at airports, cruise liners, seaports, and other touristic locations, the legal team has played an integral part in the exponential growth of the company in the past years. In light of this the challenge has been to fully integrate new team members while adjusting to the new business operating model in order to continue providing consistent high quality legal services as a team. Group general counsel and secretary to the board of directors, Pascal Duclos, believes that the consolidation of the travel retail industry impacted the work of the legal department: ‘We had to manage, over a period of less than two years, all legal matters related to two multibillion dollar acquisitions’. Namely the September 2014 acquisition of the Nuance Group and the August 2015 acquisition of the World Duty Free group. ‘The challenge was overcome thanks to the strong experience in M&A and outstanding commitment of the legal team, as well as exceptional team work with top management and other group’s communities such as finance, investors relations, business development and operations’, says Duclos. To cover the global footprint of Dufry, the legal team developed a tailor-made, electronic, global database containing more than 35,000 legal documents from more than 60 jurisdictions and covering several hundreds of subsidiaries. This tool not only provides document retention of all agreements and corporate documents of the group, but also sends automatic reminders to the legal department to enable timely renewal of agreements. ‘We have thousands of concessions agreements worldwide. This tool enables the members of the legal team to proactively provide comparative and summary reports of concessions, trademarks or corporate information to the top management of the business’.