in Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon, Lille or Marseille. For this project, we have continuously taken advantage of our strong litigation practice in public contract law, which has allowed us to anticipate criticism of the award process and provide tailored advice, even when the law was silent. Our expertise has been particularly valuable in preventing conflicts of interests, advising the client on the information to be communicated to the economic operators, and more generally throughout the negotiations. In many cases, there are no obvious nor absolute answers to the questions which bring clients to their lawyer. For this reason, beyond the mere analysis of the current state of the law, our dedicated team of lawyers on this project has systematically looked for, found, and sometimes even designed the most appropriate solutions to meet the needs of our client, always keeping legal security as a priority. Benoit, can you walk us through your strategic plan when leading the team on this project and why this plan was the best way to approach the client’s demands? For SEDIF, this project has significant economic, technical, environmental but also legal implications, considering the complexity of the contract and the high risks of litigation. Our goal has always been to provide highlevel legal advice to meet those challenges, with precision, availability, and adaptability. I was personally involved on a daily basis, leading the team and the relation with the client, which was made easier as SEDIF also set up a tight and efficient dedicated team, with a limited number of highly committed contacts. The success of the project greatly relies on the planification of tasks and the anticipation of challenges, but also on the team’s capacity to adapt, daily, to the client’s needs. Emergencies and lastminute changes are quintessential for this type of project, and our team knows exactly how to deal with them. How did you and your team pull your best and most suited assets and skills to work on this acquisition, what valuable skills did each member bring to the board? We set up a dedicated team, highly experienced in public contract law and composed of lawyers who have great knowledge of water public services, the economic operators that can provide them as well as the specific legal issues of this sector. We used our experience working on previous concession contracts for the supply of drinking water, notably Lawyer Monthly had the pleasure to speak with Benoit Neveu, Partner at Lacourte Raquin Tatar to give us some further insight into this transaction: TRANSACTION INTERVIEW 33
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy Mjk3Mzkz