The LegalEDHEC Research Centre has Legal Performance and Company Competitiveness as a subtitle, so to speak. At the heart of the Centre then is the notion of legal performance and its variations. Looking into legal performance implies looking into the contribution of the law to overall company performance. Our approach has several facets.

 
We are working, for one, on the company modes of using the law to create or to strengthen competitive advantages. In other words, it is the equivalent of determining the role the law should play in company strategy. One of our key notions is that companies should reason as much in terms of the legal management of risks as in terms of management of legal risks. A second key notion is that legal performance involves not merely the preservation of company resources but also the creation of value. So we are doing work dealing in particular with the notion of legal core competency. The approach is organised by the resources available in the field of law.
 

We are also looking into legal performance in particular fields such as competition law, intellectual property law, corporate governance, and corporate structure. The choice of these fields is, to be sure, linked to the fields of expertise of the members of the Centre but, more objectively, they also correspond to the areas of risk most frequently mentioned by companies. Our ambition is to highlight the strategic nature of the use of the law in companies, to come up with criteria by which to gauge legal performance, and, should the occasion arise, recommend legislative or regulatory changes when it turns out that legal performance involves breaking the law.
 

Some work will deal as well with compliance, the importance of which is growing in tandem with the growing complexity of the legal environment and the regulation of financial markets. Other work will focus on intellectual property rights, in particular on the use of these rights to increase corporate performance in the digital economy. LegalEDHEC is also looking into competition law and its effects on corporate strategy.