The in-house interview: Schneider Electric’s Peter Wexler

Peter Wexler is, unabashedly, a people person. As group general counsel of Paris-listed global energy company Schneider Electric, Wexler says his strategy both for building his legal team and for instructing external advisers is to focus on individual relationships and finding the right people with the right knowledge and experience.

Schneider has expanded over the last few years to a €26bn (£19.6bn) business with 180,000 employees in more than 100 countries.

Yet despite this scale and breadth, Wexler does not have a formal panel system in place. He says currently around 125 law firms worldwide are actively engaged on projects for the company, adding, “I don’t care how many we have, as long as we have the right number”.

What matters most for Wexler is the relationship he, or his team of 275 lawyers worldwide, have with their advisers. He does not care whether a firm has three partners or 300 and says if a partner he has been working with at an international firm chose to leave for a smaller player, he would be likely to stick with the partner rather than the firm.

Building a meritocracy

It has taken a little while for Wexler to put in place the internal team he currently has. He joined the company in 2007 when his then-employer, American Power Conversion (APC), was bought by Schneider Electric.

Having been deputy general counsel at APC, Wexler was then handed the job of general counsel for Schneider Electric’s critical power business unit. A couple of years later, he became general counsel of the wider company.

Schneider Electric has grown through acquisition throughout its history and in the five years since Wexler became general counsel, the company has added another four major businesses to its portfolio. Of those, the most recent merger was with UK engineering company Invensys.

The £3.4bn Invensys tie-up took effect in January last year and saw the departure of Invensys legal chief Victoria Hull.

Hull had led a team of around 50 at Invensys, and due to overlap, around 30 legal roles were lost through redundancies as the merger was integrated.

However, Wexler hastens to add that not all those who left were former Invensys employees – some of the lawyers affected by the process of combining the two teams were already at Schneider Electric.

“One of the things that I’ve always promoted is that it’s a meritocracy,” he says. “The best are going to rise to the top.”

He adds that he has developed a policy for handling the integration of merging legal teams. “For every acquisition that I’ve ever done, I’ve tried to put a member of the acquired company’s legal team as a direct report to me,” Wexler
explains.

An example from the Invensys merger was the appointment of Invensys’s associate general counsel and head of compliance for Latin America, Roberta Pêgas, as Schneider Electric’s general counsel for the region.

Wexler is generous and complimentary about the strength of his team. “My whole team’s smarter than me,” he says.

Looking for support

But it has taken some time to get the Schneider Electric legal team to where Wexler wanted it to be.

“One of the things we’re doing is focusing on the basics,” he notes. “We had a lot of work to do to bring ourselves to a position where we could have the size and capacity to focus on helping the business grow.

“It’s hard sometimes to focus on fixing your house when you need to do the laundry,” he adds.

“We’re big enough now that we have the skill sets across every discipline in most regions.”

But sometimes even the smartest team needs external support.

When it came to the Invensys merger, Wexler plumped for Linklaters, which had acted for Siemens on its £1.7bn acquisition of Invensys’ rail division. Wexler says that experience was one of the draws behind Linklaters’ appointment for Schneider Electric’s acquisition.

Another was the firm’s capabilities in French capital markets work – the Linklaters team was led by Paris-based partner Fabrice de la Morandière alongside London partners Nick Rees and Nick Rumsby.

French firm Bredin Prat was also involved, providing competition advice, with Shearman & Sterling providing some US advice. On the other side, Invensys turned to Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.

According to public filings, the fees charged by Freshfields outweighed those charged by the trio of firms acting for Schneider Electric, with the firm’s fees ranging between £6m and £7.5m. On the buy-side, total legal fees ranged from £5.6m to £6.4m.

Wexler declares himself entirely satisfied with Linklaters’ work and also the fees charged by the firm for the transaction; indeed, he says he would happily return to the firm for future deals of a similar kind.

Balancing act

Schneider Electric still does a lot of legal work itself. Intellectual property protection is a key part of the job, with 45 IP specialists on Wexler’s team. The company owns 700 patents and has 15,000 IP portfolios.

Wexler is also responsible for compliance, and notes ruefully that “unfortunately it’s our biggest growth area” due to the many regions in which Schneider Electric operates that still have political uncertainty.

Regional lead in-house counsel are able to pick their own external advisers to a point – once legal fees reach €50,000 the matter must be referred up to Wexler for approval.

He describes the team as both a support function and a business unit. Touching on the current trend for in-housers to be seen as “business partners” to a company, Wexler says this is often tricky.

“It’s a real balancing act,” he notes. “Everyone wants to be a business partner.”

Wexler does not sit on Schneider Electric’s board but attends board meetings where necessary and reports to the company’s deputy CEO Emmanuel Babeau. Although Schneider Electric is French-listed and the headquarters are in Paris, Wexler spends much of his time in his native US.

He is also on the road for several days each month, travelling to see his teams around the world and ensuring they also get that personal touch – just proving that even the largest companies can be people businesses.