Empower your team. Elevate your business.
Bespoke advisory, audits, and development programs for high-performing in-house lawyers.
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Antoine works with legal & compliance department leaders to transform their teams into trusted business partners who consistently deliver greater value to the business. He helps them design the optimal architecture and operating model for legal & compliance functions and innovative strategies to address critical legal risks.
Antoine’s engagements include long-term assignments (strategic advisory, audits of legal departments, transformation projects, learning & development programmes) as well as one-off events (keynotes, off-sites, and workshops).
Antoine’s clients include legal & compliance departments across Europe and beyond, including leading players in banking, finance, private equity, energy and utilities, pharma and life sciences, tech, telecommunications, media & entertainment, chemicals and materials, industry, air travel, food and retail, automotive, consulting services, construction and public services.
A client list can be made available upon request.
Business Partnering
Today's legal departments are striving to operate and be recognised as strategic business partners. As AI takes over tasks that used to constitute the bulk of in-house legal work, successful business partnering is rapidly becoming a necessity for company lawyers.
Yet the aspiration to operate at that level does not go anywhere without a strong and shared ambition, an in-depth understanding of what business partnering is really about beyond the buzzword, and a strong foundation in strategic thinking, legal risk management, and communication skills.
Antoine publishes extensively on business partnering, delivers keynotes to company lawyers, helps legal departments assess their business partnering performance and conducts workshops internationally for legal teams to help them acquire and master the necessary mindset and skills.
Organisational Design
Antoine has worked closely with leaders and teams in legal departments to address their most pressing organisational and operational challenges, including the following:
How to increase the cohesion among legal teams scattered around regions and business units?
How to build a compliance department from scratch?
How to ensure business proximity while cruising through the complexity of a matrix organisation?
How to best position the legal department vis-à-vis other corporate functions?
How to avoid overwork and ensure the limited resources of the legal & compliance function are assigned to the right priorities?
How to change the culture of the legal department? Is the legal department operating as effectively as it could?
How to develop synergies across the legal teams?
How to create a single legal team post-merger?
How to optimise the collaboration with outside counsel?
How to navigate the incessant waves of new AI tools and legal tech?
Facing complex structural or operational challenges within your legal team?
Innovative Legal Strategies
Lawyers may have identified a critical legal risk. However, convincing the business to take it into account, changing habits, and actually reducing the risk are quite another matter. Writing a policy that hardly anyone will ever read is not the answer.
To have an impact on the organisation, lawyers must think creatively, explore strategies beyond the traditional realm of legal work, proactively engage with senior management, and collaborate with colleagues across departments. To most lawyers, this does not come naturally.
Antoine advises legal and business leaders on these matters, challenging preconceived ideas, opening new perspectives, stimulating creative and strategic thinking, and sharing his own insights and practical ideas.
Examples of assignments include:
In an international industrial company exposed to major contractual risks in international sales, advising on how to reduce such exposure through governance reform, awareness campaigns, and changes to the sales process;
In a pharma company where businesspeople were lost in the complexity of the internal compliance processes, using legal design to clarify and simplify the compliance journey;
In a company where legal policies were scattered, often contradictory and mostly ignored by the business, applying design thinking to create a new overall policy framework, redrafting policies accordingly, and making them readily accessible, attractive to read, and regularly updated.
Planning a conference?
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Thank you, Antoine! You have been just fantastic! The project roadmap has attracted a lot of enthusiasm and interest all over our community, and we are so grateful to you for that! You have done an amazing job!
Laurence Einsweiler, Legal Director Belgium-Luxembourg & International Developed Markets Vaccines Legal Lead, Pfizer
Learning & Development
Operating at the business partner level requires a specific set of skills. They are not part of the standard legal education, and it may take years to learn them on the job – more or less.
Antoine designs and, with the assistance of colleagues, delivers bespoke L&D programmes covering:
Business partnering skills
Risk management for lawyers
Strategic thinking for lawyers
Written communication
Presentations skills for lawyers
Legal design, negotiations
Outside counsel management
Project management for lawyers.
Bespoke programmes can be created to meet the specific needs of your legal team. Examples of such programmes include:
A week-long programme on advisory and communication skills for an international company, gathering participants from four different continents;
A series of programmes embedded into a year-long initiative to transform the mindset and skills to better contribute to risk management and deliver clearer, shorter, more practical and more decisive legal advice.
Numerous workshops on risk management focusing on the specific context and risk profile of the companies.
Feedback from participants consistently describes the programmes as inspiring, highly relevant for company lawyers, practical, and energising.
Programmes are available in English, French and Dutch.
Considering a learning & development program or an offsite for your legal team?
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The GC Circle is a curated community of chief legal officers with international responsibilities, providing them a space to connect, think together, and support one another as they navigate the complexities of senior legal leadership.
How it works
Members meet five times a year in half-day sessions, hosted on a rotating basis at members' corporate offices or at leading international law firms. Sessions combine peer conversations, presentations by members, and discussions with high-level guest speakers on matters of strategic importance.
A summer gathering adds a more informal dimension to the year. Between meetings, members stay in touch through a dedicated WhatsApp group and direct contact.
Membership
Membership is by invitation and subject to criteria designed to ensure the quality and coherence of the group: a top-level legal function, international scope of responsibilities, and a good fit with existing members.
Members describe the GC Circle as a rare space where they can speak freely, think out loud, and find both practical insights and genuine camaraderie among peers who understand their world.
Interested in becoming a member?
Transforming law firms into outstanding, value-creating communities.