Peter Wexler – GC Powerlist
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United States 2019

Peter Wexler

Senior vice president and chief legal and compliance officer | Schneider Electric

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United States 2019

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Peter Wexler

Senior vice president and chief legal and compliance officer | Schneider Electric

About

‘Every day, Peter Wexler deals with a different problem on a different continent as chief legal and compliance officer of Schneider Electric, a Fortune 500 global energy management company with operations in more than 100 countries and more than 180,000 employees. It has been the platform for him to shape the corporate law function and influence the international growth of his company. Working with the more than 300 professionals in his legal department, Wexler has truly become the “master of the deal”, creating strategy and support for the company’s “consistent, opportunistic and serial acquisition” of companies around the world. Since becoming general counsel in 2009, Wexler has been at the helm of nearly 90 transactions. During his first year as chief legal and compliance officer, he oversaw about 140 lawyers. Under Wexler’s tenure, that number has more than doubled as the company has acquired notable companies in billion-dollar transactions like French nuclear reactor maker Areva in 2009, Spanish IT company Telvent in 2011, and British engineering and IT firm Invensys in 2013. The strategy has also included a variety of important divestitures such as the $900m sale of Schneider’s sensors business, $380m sale of its juno lighting business and €35m sale of Kapsch TrafficCom in December 2015. One of Wexler’s outstanding abilities has been his expertise at post-acquisition integration, not only from the company wide cultural perspective but in terms of his own legal department. For example, from just the three acquisitions (noted above), Wexler “inherited” more than 75 professionals who joined his legal department, creating multiple organisational, cultural, capacity and expertise challenges. One of his best practices has not only been fostering diversity within the legal team but promoting someone from the acquisition into his senior leadership team so that they could more easily become “Schneider lawyers”. Wexler reorganised and centralised the entire legal department during his first year as general counsel, creating the foundation for his current, streamlined structure. Supporting the lawyers and the deals is Wexler’s focus on technology. He’s instituted a dedicated database for sorting out contracts and “gone digital” for easy access, whether it’s compliance-related or related to sub-segments, like business agent contracts or commercial contracting, for example. He has also consciously done something more low-tech – instituting mandatory meetings on a regional and global basis for information sharing. As Wexler says, “just because you have the technology to communicate doesn’t mean you have a relationship with a particular person you’re communicating with”’.

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