Biography

Emilie has been GC at Numan for two years. Emilie started her career as a corporate lawyer in private practice, where her clients were almost exclusively founder-led businesses. Working alongside individuals and helping them and their businesses through their first external investment, scaling and exit made moving in-house a natural next step. Emilie’s first in-house experience was on a 16 month secondment to Soho House where she was the first, and at the time sole, in-house lawyer for the whole global group during a period of significant expansion. She later left private practice to join a fintech client where she stayed for nearly four years, before joining Numan. Working in what is still a novel, highly regulated and rapidly evolving sector that is subject to exceptional levels of scrutiny by regulators, the media and the public means that there really are no two days alike. Since joining Numan, Emilie has experienced all the usual projects that come with being in a scaling business – two fundraisings, launching a new incentive scheme, designing, implementing and adapting governance structures – whilst building a team adept at using technology and tools to deliver for the business and also navigating the unique challenges of Numan’s sector, in particular frequent shifts in the market and changes in regulatory approach.

The role of general counsel (GC) has evolved significantly into that of a strategic business partner. How do you balance commercial objectives with legal risk?

I remind people that they are often two sides of the same coin; my team is trained to identify and highlight risks, and adept at ‘showing their workings’, but I always encourage commercial teams and stakeholders to counter with what the risks are of not doing something. For me, balancing the two is a process, not an instinct. I make the legal risk explicit, put it alongside the commercial risk of inaction so the business is weighing like for like, and then own the trade-off with them rather than hand down a verdict.

It is important to understand that the advice my team gives is only one factor to be considered, and actually very rarely the deciding factor. There are obviously some lines that cannot be crossed, for instance in my current role, anything that touches patient safety. But the majority of what we do is very nuanced and essentially it is about balancing and optimising risk and opportunities of all kinds.

It is also critical to have built trust with your stakeholders by understanding their roles, objectives, pressures and ways of working and by looking for ways to help them achieve and deliver. Then, on the occasions where the legal advice has to trump the commercial objectives, the business knows that it is for good reason.

The other half of the method is that, in circumstances where I am going to have to deliver advice that will essentially kill a project or an idea, I try to offer alternative ways of approaching things rather than simply arriving with the problem. The biggest impact I have ever had in this way of working was in my last role when the business wanted to rebrand to a shorter version of the then current name. The commercial team had worked on it for weeks and three weeks before their planned launch date, asked me to sign off ‘from a trade mark perspective’. It was immediately clear to me that the proposed name was not going to work. The founders had been clear that they wanted to maximise protection of the new name but we would have faced a number of significant obstacles in achieving registrations in our key territories and classes. We could attempt to weave our way through the pre-existing rights but we were going to end up with, at best, very patchy TM protection and we’d have to pursue an expensive and unsure path of most resistance to even achieve that. I decided to come up with an alternative suggestion, not necessarily to be the actual new brand but to prove it was possible to come up with something meaningful, that worked internationally, could be successfully trademarked in our key territories and for which a .com domain was available to buy. It took me a few evenings of research but, to my surprise, when I pitched it to one of the founders and the CFO, they went for it. It still surprises me when I see it out there in the real world! It also reinforced an approach I insist on wherever possible as a GC: involving legal early, before commercial objectives are cast in stone, avoids these near-misses altogether and it is far easier to help shape a direction than to unpick one at the last minute. That, for me, is the balance in practice: not legal as the brake, but legal finding the route that gets the business where it wants to go.

Have you had any particularly unique or defining experiences during your legal career?

During my time in private practice, I was fortunate to work with many inspiring founders in the luxury brands and hospitality sectors, but the really unique feature of that whole period was that it was serendipitously bookended by Charlotte Tilbury. The first closing I worked on after qualifying, in which I played a tiny role, was the initial investment round for Charlotte’s yet to be launched eponymous make-up brand. The very last transaction I worked on before leaving private practice was acting for Charlotte in her personal capacity on the sale of a majority stake to Puig, the Spanish fashion, beauty and fragrance conglomerate. The competitive auction process was one of the biggest and most complex transactions to take place in the first Covid lockdown of 2020. By that point my role was a world away from the junior one I had played at the start, which is part of what made the symmetry land so personally. It was an enormous achievement for Charlotte and her team that was a privilege to witness.

What made the whole arc defining, rather than simply memorable, was watching those founders build something from first investment to landmark exit and reaffirming for me what I had first felt years ago on my long secondment to Soho House, that was where I wanted to be – inside a business helping to shape it, not advising from the outside on the handful of days and weeks that mattered most. Within weeks I had begun another secondment that took me in-house for good. There was no better way to close that chapter of my career.