About

A powerhouse in the already lucrative and rapidly-growing mobile games market, Gameloft was acquired by Vivendi in 2016 which led to a restructure of the 17-person legal team to meet the new needs of being part of a CAC 40 company. The legal team is headed by general counsel and compliance officer Jérôme Sibade and is now structured principally around three main expertise areas – IP headed by Hortense Jouquan, contracts led by Alix Faguer and data protection which is managed by Isabelle Le Vot. Sibade explains that, in addition to the restructure, the team felt it should ‘improve our processes – specifically with respect to the clearance of intellectual property in our games’ – and define a clear strategy in relation to data protection. On the latter, Sibade says that ‘it has probably become one of the most risky areas for the company, and the data protection team is now fully involved in all strategic decisions of the company as data is key’. It has also been at the forefront of some extremely exciting and strategically important projects for Gameloft. ‘The legal team has been involved in the review and negotiation of a strategic partnership with Apple, as part of the Apple Arcade game subscription service which will feature Gameloft games’, Sibade says. ‘The team is also involved in an important litigation in the US, and has assisted the M&A team during and following the acquisition of the company FreshPlanet in December 2018. This company is the publisher of SongPop and SongPop 2, which are the biggest music trivia games with more than 100 million downloads to date, and this major achievement is also notable for being Gameloft’s first ever acquisition’. When summing up the team’s culture, Sibade is clear that knowledge-sharing is heavily emphasised. ‘All in-house counsel are experts in certain areas, and the idea is that every month team members should share difficulties, questions and ideas with other members of the team. Each lawyer is made to feel part of a team and can understand the global strategy of the company – particularly through testing our games to understand what we offer to customers’.