Team size: Six

As General Counsel of a leading education group that opens and operates international schools, Emilie has played a pivotal role in driving the organization’s global expansion across Asia, the UK and Europe. She has successfully led complex cross-border transactions and guided the group through securing major financing from investors. Emilie leads a high-performing, future-ready legal team that partners closely with the business to deliver both strategic insight and operational excellence, positioning the group to thrive in an increasingly competitive global education market.

What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

Over the past two years, my team has supported the group on several high-impact priorities across both growth and governance. On the transactional side, we successfully secured group financing, helping to underpin the group’s strategic plans despite a challenging market environment. In parallel, we enabled business expansion into Southeast Asia and the Middle East, supporting market entry and the establishment or deepening of regional operations and partnerships. Alongside business development, we strengthened the organisation’s foundations by further enhancing the group compliance framework. This included rolling out more comprehensive compliance programmes and targeted training to embed consistent standards and practical guidance across the business. We also achieved a key regulatory milestone by successfully completing the cross-border data transfer filing with the relevant authority in China, supporting compliant cross-border data flows for ongoing operations.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

In periods of instability, I begin with rapid triage to identify what could most seriously impact the organisation and to prioritise actions accordingly. I take a risk-based approach, focusing resources on the issues with the highest impact and urgency to keep the business moving while remaining within acceptable risk parameters. In parallel, I ensure compliance continuity by tracking mandatory filings, reporting triggers, and cross-border regulatory requirements so that there are no surprises. Once the situation stabilises, I lead a lessons-learned review and translate the outcomes into stronger playbooks, controls, and targeted training to reduce recurrence and improve readiness. Throughout, I aim to be a calm, pragmatic partner to the business – providing clear options and solutions that balance speed, protection, and long-term resilience.

AI has been taken seriously as a potentially revolutionary technological change in the legal world for a number of years now. Has it had a meaningful impact in how your legal team works in this time?

AI has had a meaningful impact on how my team works, primarily by improving speed and consistency while keeping legal judgement firmly with the lawyers. We use it to accelerate first drafts and issue-spotting for routine documents so that we can focus our time on negotiation strategy and risk decisions. It also helps us structure research, build checklists and playbooks, and strengthen knowledge management through templates and clause libraries. At the same time, we apply clear guardrails on confidentiality, data handling, and verification – AI is an efficiency tool, not an authority. Overall, it has reduced low-value manual work and freed up capacity for higher-impact advisory and transaction execution.

What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?

We handle matters in-house when they fall within our established jurisdictions and can be managed efficiently with our internal context, but we engage external counsel for key transactions – particularly when entering a new market or jurisdiction as part of business expansion, or when we require specialised expertise such as intellectual property or data protection. When evaluating external counsel, we look for high-value support—not just getting the job done, but getting it done smartly. The best advisers combine being book-smart and street-smart, offering pragmatic, commercially workable solutions and clear risk framing. We also place strong emphasis on whether they listen well and understand our needs, so that their advice is truly tailored rather than generic. Finally, responsiveness, ownership of timelines, and proactive issue-spotting are key indicators of strong performance.