At a time when corporate legal and tax departments are undergoing intensive changes, namely:

1. The growing exposure of in-house lawyers and their companies;
2. Increasing demands in terms of staff responsiveness;
3. Higher expectations in terms of performance;
4. Internationalisation of the legal reference framework

We assist our clients in reflecting on how to organise their legal and tax departments. In this respect, Patrick Bignon co-authored a book entitled: The Legal Function and the Company, which deals with all the challenges facing corporate legal departments. 

Some of our assignments:

• Assessing the industrial property department of a French group and giving recommendations on organisation to improve its efficiency;
• Analysing the legal department of a large listed French corporation to determine the necessary evolutions in terms of organisation to meet the requirements of the corporation and regulatory changes;
• Recommendations for a corporation on how to organise the legal department and benchmarking the work structure with the work organisation in law firms;
• The role of the legal function (“minimum” legal function) and possible scenarios for its organisation (centralised/decentralised...).

The Main Challenges Facing the Corporate Legal Department (Patrick Bignon - March 2008)

OTHER INFORMATION:

Patrick Bignon was part of the task force that worked on uniting the profession of lawyers in private practice with that of in-house counsel, set up in 2005 by the French Ministry of Justice. The task force’s report was published in 2006. .