Practice of the law of companies in difficulty: Interview with Fanny Hurreau, partner

Fanny Hurreau, can you come back to your journey?

My career as a lawyer is quite closely linked to that of Arst Avocats. I first joined the firm as an associate. I quickly had a fairly general practice in business law, alongside Morgan Jamet , which was essentially oriented towards litigation. It is quite naturally that my association was made and I have been more specifically in charge, for five years now, of the management of the problems of commercial leases and collective procedures, for a clientele of lessors, in particular institutional ones with whom we have forged close ties.

Since you immediately get to the heart of the matter, commercial lease law and insolvency law or commercial lease law in collective proceedings?

The question is more than justified. It is very difficult to answer that. The practice which was born within the firm Arst Avocats is that fairly classic of the two matters. But we have succeeded in developing this hybrid practice of commercial lease law in collective proceedings. It all started with training that Morgan Jamet was required to give from 2008 to lessors faced with managing the relationship with the lessee in insolvency proceedings, a situation that is very poorly understood because it is at the crossroads of two very technical matters. Setting up these training courses has made it possible to model the material, to better understand it and therefore to know how to make it understood by our customers. The experience we have developed to manage these situations and the questions they raise has placed us among the few law firms that know how to do it.

And do you like that? Isn't it a bit dry and very technical?

Like anyone who has had to work a lot to learn how to do something, this work that has been done on these subjects, constantly renewed, has resulted in the fact that the difficulty or even the technicality are no longer felt as such. Yes, it's a real pleasure to work on these files, in constantly changing contexts and for clients with whom we really enjoy doing it. Our interlocutors recognize our competence and it is a real professional satisfaction to reach this level. When they contact us, we know that they need our expertise and we know that we are going to deal with interesting and delicate issues. It is a subject that is both very technical and very concrete, in which knowing the uses and the actors is as important as knowing the law.

Does the economic climate have an impact on this activity?

Certainly yes. If the practitioners of the law of companies in difficulty suffered globally from the drastic reduction in the number of collective proceedings opened in 2020, 2021 and even 2022, we for our part had to intervene in a very large number of files in which our lessor clients found themselves confronted with the economic or financial difficulties of their takers. It was a lot of big brands and we had to intervene in most of the big files of place in the field of retail . Today, the resurgence of insolvency proceedings also leads us to intervene again in smaller cases which are added to the others. Knowing that we also have the more traditional activity in terms of commercial leases or the treatment of business difficulties for debtors or buyers. We are never bored and we have expanded our team to always be able to show the same reactivity.

So you are a happy lawyer?

I think I can say yes. If this job is not always easy to practice for many reasons, but like so many others who are certainly more so, I have the chance to appreciate my field of activity and the clients for whom I intervene. Arst Avocats is also a forward-looking, dynamic structure and I feel good about it.

Last question, are you going to stop there?

Never (it's not possible with Morgan Jamet, he never leaves us alone). We are always on the move to develop our firm's activity and attract new talent. We co-sign, Morgan Jamet and myself, a book on debt collection, which Arst Formation publishes. This is a book that tends to give very practical keys to creditors in the management of this often very sensitive subject. We also have other areas of development in progress but which it is not yet possible to talk about until they have materialized. We're wishing for the best.