Legal Insights

Following a report drawn up by the General Inspectorate of Finance on the certification of the accounts of French small businesses, the Government has included in the Law on business growth and transformation, known as the “PACTE” Law , provisions for an harmonization of the thresholds for the appointment of statutory auditors regardless of the corporate form of the company whose accounts are certified, thereby raising the certification thresholds in commercial companies to the level of the thresholds for small businesses provided for in the Accounting Directive 2013/34/EU of the European Parliament and the Council of June 26, 2013.

In the wake of the reform of the French Labor Code implemented by the so-called Macron Ordinances of September 22, 2017 and the reform of the apprenticeship and vocational training system introduced by the Law on professional future of September 5, 2018, the reform of unemployment insurance is an additional part of the “major transformation” of the French labor market that has been carried out by Emmanuel Macron over the past two years.

While the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (“TTIP”, also known as the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement or “TAFTA” ) has been abandoned, the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”), in an opinion dated April 30, 2019, ruled on the compatibility with EU law of the mechanism for the settlement of disputes provided for under the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (“CETA”) entered into between Canada and the European Union .

The right to strike is the pet peeve of French employers… and for good reasons. France is the champion of strike actions: between 2005 and 2014, it lost between six and eight times more working days than the United Kingdom or Germany; in 2016 it experienced no less than 801 strikes.
The right to strike is a fundamental right but it is also a subject of controversy and conflict, particularly on the thorny issue of so-called “abusive” strikes.

On April 15, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (French Data Protection authority, hereinafter the “CNIL”) presented its 2018 activity report, i.e. the assessment that it draws from its activities during the year 2018 which has been marked by the application of the General Data Protection Regulation and the new French Data Protection Act.
From the CNIL’s assessment and the decisions it took in 2018, we can learn lessons to prevent the risks incurred when processing personal data.

Article 17 of the Law for the balance of trade relationships in the agricultural and food industry of October 30, 2018 (known as the “EGalim” Law) authorized the French Government to recast by means of an ordinance Title IV of Book IV of the French Commercial Code on transparency, practices that restrict competition and other prohibited practices.