An energy law specialist, Harald Knoebl held a series of senior in-house legal positions with ENGIE group companies (formerly GDF Suez) going back to 2002 when he worked for Gaz de France Deutschland. He has been part of ENGIE’s E&P division since 2007, as general counsel since 2012, continuing his role through the division’s acquisition by Neptune Energy. Since May 2017, while Knoebl still has ultimate responsibility for legal matters and a new general counsel who reports to him, he has taken on a vastly expanded general secretary role which encompasses a broader set of responsibilities and is more business-focused.

He lists the €4bn acquisition of ENGIE E&P by Neptune Energy as ‘certainly the most outstanding highlight in the last two years of my career’, which he describes as ‘a very complex transaction across 12 jurisdictions with various regulatory approvals and the transfer of over 150 oil and gas licenses and over 1,500 employees in all these countries’. Knoebl feels that working for a company that is entirely owned by private equity funds ‘means that day-to-day business is much more dynamic, with new ways of working and new challenges for the teams which require a great deal of resilience and guidance to the teams’. Knoebl believes that, when dealing with a large volume of cross-border work, ‘sharing information quickly is key’, and he has ‘enhanced information sharing processes in order to be transparent and provide for a motivating work environment’.

More generally, his recipe for success as an in-house lawyer is as follows: ‘First, you must have an excellent knowledge of the law and its implications on the business. You must also put the right resources together, both internally and externally, and understand the business context in order to find solutions to the business’s issues. Finally, you must be close to the leaders of the company in order to understand their needs and preoccupations as well as their strategic vision and plans. Be their counsel – in the true meaning of the word’.