About

Consisting of 12 lawyers and one non-lawyer, the legal team at diverse technology consulting and engineering service provider AKKA Technologies is responsible for a wide remit encompassing many different legal and compliance challenges. To mitigate the effects of technically complex hurdles slowing or preventing the completion of important deals, Jean-Philippe Laligand, group general counsel, explains how the team provides both ‘protection and comfort’ to each business unit. The team is populated by outstanding professionals, however, particularly praised are the talents of Jean-Philippe Carbonel and Anne-Claude Pinget– who are known to add their own specific strengths including organisational skill, the consolidation of relationships with clients and a strong depth of expertise alongside a global business perspective. Assistant and paralegal Laurence Facchin is also recommended in the same vein. Cementing the foundation from which the company has experienced ‘very strong’ growth, Laligand explains how the creation and organisation of different pillars of the business, most notably in Germany and the Rest of the World region, was facilitated to a large extent by the legal team. He states that the team was required to come up with unique solutions under strict time deadlines when considering the expansion of AKKA’s operations, and that in achieving this they were forced to ‘think differently [and] in a proactive way’. The department has undergone a recent decentralising process, meaning that senior counsels were hired outside headquarters with the view to dispersing leadership and experience around the company’s different geographical outposts, strengthening the team as whole. The AKKA legal team has been very successful at projecting its advice to the highest levels of the company. For example, in terms of communication with senior management figures, Laligand explains: ‘My guiding principle is that each lawyer, whatever level he or she is, has to prepare to be in interaction with CEO and senior management. They receive a brief from me in order to overcome what has to be considered a challenge’.