Team size: 30, across France, Germany, Italy and Spain

How do you ensure the legal function supports business resilience during periods of uncertainty or disruption?

When I joined Qonto in 2019 as its first-ever legal hire, resilience meant designing the function to scale before we knew how fast we’d need it to. Seven years and eight markets later, that principle still guides how I run Legal, Public Affairs and ESG as one team of thirty across France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

Three things make that resilience concrete rather than aspirational.

Governance: structured Board reporting, engaged directors, documented decision-making and clear escalation paths turn uncertainty into something we can act on, not just react to, including how we govern our own use of AI. AI can assist a Board, but director liability stays human. Building that boundary explicitly into our governance, rather than leaving it implicit, is itself an ethics practice: it protects judgement calls and crisis response as human territory, while freeing capacity elsewhere through our ‘Augmented Legal Department’.

Capital: I’ve led Legal through every Qonto funding round and our Regate acquisition — resilience starts with a balance sheet that can absorb a shock, not just a process to manage one.

Regulatory proximity: our Public Affairs team keeps us in direct contact with supervisors like the ACPR and their European counterparts, so regulatory shifts reach us as advance notice, not surprises.

How do you see AI and automation reshaping the legal profession, and how are you leveraging technology in your own legal team?

AI is the biggest structural shift I’ve seen. We’ve moved from experimenting with tools to co-building an ‘Augmented Legal Department’: I recently hired a dedicated Legal AI Engineer (no legal background, a pure developer) to design and ship production-grade agents, not demos, across contracts, litigation management, Board management and secondary deals, etc., working hand in hand with our AI Lab and Platform teams. Claude and Cursor are now native to how the team works day to day.

The mindset shift matters more than the tooling: agents don’t replace legal judgement, they free it up. My job is to decide what should be agentised, set the governance, quality and access standards around it, and make sure adoption is trusted, not imposed. Done well, this is how a lean legal team keeps pace with a fintech scaling across Europe, rather than growing headcount at the same rate as the business.

What is one leadership principle or practice that has had the greatest impact on your career as a GC?

The principle that has shaped my career most is: let scope follow trust, not the job desc or the org chart. I joined Qonto alone in 2019 to build a legal function; I said yes to Public Affairs in 2022 and to ESG/Impact soon after, well before either had a natural home, because I believed the team could grow into it. I try to give my own hires the same latitude: our recent Legal AI Engineer role was pitched, deliberately, as a co-founder-style mandate, not a narrow job description.

The tension is real: ownership without structure can drift. What makes it work is pairing that latitude with clear accountability and hiring for curiosity over credentials, so people expand into ambiguity rather than get lost in it. It’s how a team of one becomes a team of thirty without losing its edge.