Florence M. Guéry leads the legal function at the Paris headquartered renewable energy company Neoen, and commands an impressive CV with years of experience practicing both in law firms and in-house in large French organisations within the Louis Drefyus Group, including its holding company as well as Direct Energie. Currently in charge of ‘all legal issues for France’, Guéry explains her integral part in making the Neoen in-house team a ‘real business partner’ and being seen as a ‘solution finder rather than “blocking” business’. Having won over her colleagues in this way, she explains that ‘now lawyers are present to steering committees’.

She has also emphasised the role of specialism, ensuring the team become ‘experts in some fields’ but maintain capabilities to ‘follow projects in other fields’, whilst also ensuring it can work autonomously. Transactions Guéry has overseen during her career have been high-value and of an innovative nature; she has drafted ‘complex’ EPC and O&M contracts, built a ‘worldwide’ general liability insurance program as well as overseeing the ‘migration of the pay system worldwide’. Choosing to highlight three particular instances of success during her in-house career, she mentions ‘the introduction of the IRU concept (indefeasible right of use) in France in the telecommunications sector, a sui generis contract that gave the company the opportunity to mutualise optical fibres and ducts for several clients’.

She continues: ‘The acquisition of the company’s first wind farm when the dialog was blocked with operational people and the negotiation of a 800MW CCGT contract and a 300MW solar farm contract, [the] biggest solar farm in Europe’. Regarding the overall state of the in-house legal sector, she is proud to be a part of what she calls a new generation of lawyers who are: ‘not only part of the “support teams” of a company but a generation with a real added value fully integrated in the business team and who have a major role in winning tenders, building commercial relationship and signing contracts on a win-win basis’.