About

Mouvement des Entreprises de France’s (MEDEF) legal team is led by Joëlle Simon, the company’s deputy director general, legal, ethics and corporate governance lead. Responsible for legal support for the country’s largest employer federation, the team has a workforce of five lawyers in addition to Simon, as well as a number of support staff to bring to bear on its demanding workload. ‘As legal department, our main task is to lobby French and European institutions to improve the legal and regulatory environment of French companies’, says Simon. ‘In 2018-2019, we were very active during the debates before the adoption of the PACTE business growth and transformation law and supportive of the evolution of the company’s purpose. [He] organised GDPR implementation training sessions for our members, produced a position paper alongside our economic department making public our initial thoughts on European competition policies to take into account the role of the new technology giants and supported the adoption of a company law package which will facilitate the corporate mobility and the digitalisation of companies throughout Europe’. Going on to speak about the team culture that contributes so much to its success, Simon emphasizes the individual contribution that each member makes: ‘We are a small team and each member in her or his position contributes to the success of our common actions. In the new organisation of MEDEF, the transversality of the legal functions has been recognised and our hierarchical link to the Directorate General confirmed. We see that as a recognition of our collective work for the benefit of MEDEF’.