Michael Gillis (Engie): "We create value by being both a business partner and a guardian of the temple"

Leaders League: How does your legal department create value for your company and act as a business partner? Do you have any use cases to share?

Michael Gillis: We create value for Engie in two complementary ways. On the one hand, we are there to ensure that the business grows. We are true partners, closely aligned with the company’s challenges and risk appetite. Our intimate knowledge of the business allows us to provide innovative and pragmatic solutions to our internal clients. To thrive and become indispensable business partners, our in-house lawyers are expected to embrace a risk-based mindset to enable them to deal with the uncertainties inherent to business in general and to legal matters in particular and to overcome complexity and ambiguity and deliver decisive, actionable, accurate and reliable advice despite legal and contextual uncertainties.

On the other hand, we also act as guardians, ensuring that Engie does not cross certain lines when it comes to laws, regulations, and our own ethical standards. This is essential to protect the Engie Group, including its reputation. When it comes to ethics, we train employees and help to conduct impartial investigations when required. We are also available to help colleagues if they have questions or witness breaches of the ethics rules.

A good example of how the team creates value is the agreement concluded in December 2023 between Engie and the Belgian government on the extension of the lifetime of two nuclear power plants in Belgium and the financing of nuclear waste disposal. The legal team was closely involved in this important negotiation which lasted for roughly two years and is of structural importance for the Engie Group and the security of electricity supply of Belgium.

How are digital, innovation and artificial intelligence technologies integrated into legal processes at Engie?

Artificial intelligence is already being used in the legal team in an exploratory manner and an ambitious digital roadmap is in place sponsored by the general counsel of the Engie Group. 

All employees have access to a secure Microsoft Copilot-type tool to assist them on a daily basis with their work. We also trained our circa 150 in-house lawyers in Europe on the basics of how to use digital technology in a very pragmatic way, through regular two-hour sessions. Sometimes to run a marathon, you must ensure you can run 5 kilometers first.

My goal is to demystify these technologies, go beyond the hype and allow people to work smarter and more efficiently.

How do you develop and retain the legal department teams?

At Engie, we have a real strategy for developing employees that goes beyond the "happy few" and high-potential programs. We want to enable everyone to unleash their potential, via training and development opportunities open to all. This is key to attracting, retaining and growing our talent-base and making it a lever of performance. 

In concrete terms, what this means is that an enterprising lawyer can work on a wide variety of cases thanks to our organizational matrix serving the Engie group’s four global business units. We have also launched an exchange program allowing a lawyer from one country to go and work for a number of weeks in another country on a specific project. It’s a great opportunity to learn about other legal systems and ways of working. We must step away from the idea that in-house lawyers are confined to work only on legal files related to the legal system they were specifically trained in.

Lastly, I am convinced that to keep people engaged, we must give them the opportunity to take on cross-functional roles as project managers, or experts in their field. This also serves to tackle the traditional problem that not everyone in the legal team can become a manager of a bigger team (you can only have so many management layers in an organization…)

Interview by Pierre Marteel of Leaders League