When asked to talk about his lawfirm Alain responds with a lot of humility. 'Lawfirm is a big word for us!' he says with a laugh. 'We are four partners working together in Auxerre, the capital of the Yonne département. With my colleague Frédéric Leprêtre, we work a lot on banking laws with financial institutions. Another of our important activities is real estate law. I work a lot for insurance companies. My associate Mr Ferraris is a specialist of public law, an important domain in France. He is also the current head of our local bar. Our last associate Fabien Cornu works mostly on penal law and labour law. I also have a personal fondness for rural law, because this is a region of vineyards...'
That is a lot of areas to cover for such a small lawfirm. 'Well, this is what our clients want,' answers Alain. 'Law has become such a huge thing for people and companies, it pervades every aspect of life; people need solutions for everything. Clients come to us with many, many different kinds of problems, and we have to adapt to that.' Alain says he cannot follow the trend of specialisation in a rural area. 'I can understand specialising when you work in big, urban areas', he says, 'but for us it is exactly the opposite. Our local bar has perhaps sixty members. We have to be able to answer all the needs of our clients. On the other hand, they are very, very faithful to us. They appreciate the link and they always come back to us for any kind of new problem.'
Alain grew up in Auxerre, which is surrounded by one of the nicest countrysides in France. A wonderful nature, heritage, and gastronomy can be found all around the Yonne area. However, while it once had important industries, the region has known many economic misfortunes.'We are sort of stuck between Paris and Dijon, which is the major Burgundian city. So a lot of companies relocated either to Dijon or straight to the capital. At some point, it left Auxerre pretty empty. For example, the big dairy product company Yoplait is headquartered here and used to be a big client of mine, but they were taken over by Chinese investors and that meant the end of their collaboration with me...'
Alain remains positive nevertheless, as the people of the area turned their problems into solutions: rather than wallowing in their status as an isolated and poor country town, they became one of the most affordable yet comfortable places to settle for young entrepreneurs in France. 'Take for example the company that makes catering for Eurostar trains', says Alain, 'it is based here in a small village. Every morning, they ship their food to Paris to go on board the train, and it's high quality food. The young entrepreneur behind this venture told me there are many advantages to being here: he could invest in his own business without starving like he would have in a big city. His employees are keen on working with him, they are not constantly looking for something better like in Paris, they are satisfied with the lifestyle they can afford here. These are the advantages of being in an area like ours and they create a lot of business for a lawyer. So, although I saw a lot of big companies closing or relocating, I also saw small businesses rising. Another example: a lot of little companies are settling here to produce high tech components as subcontractors for car manufacturers.'
At the end of the day, Alain has had a very successful career, juggling between many different areas of law and adapting to the changes in local economy. 'We never had big downturns', he says, 'the market has been changing very much but the global result has been pretty much stable. For example, my activity in real estate law used to be centered on small individual houses, which is a market that went away, but at the same time bigger buildings started cropping up. Here, anytime a door closes, a window opens!'
