Enterprise Values vs. Enterprise Value: Governance in a New Era of Sustainable Transformation

Each year Lex Mundi works with members of the global general counsel community to identify a core challenge to advancing corporate strategy. Starting with consultations in mid-2021, Lex Mundi formed the topic “Enterprise Values vs. Enterprise Value: Governance in an Era of Sustainable Transformation”. This topic reflected the increasing public and shareholder interest in the environmental and social impact of large companies.

The topic builds upon Lex Mundi’s previous series, “General Counsel in a Fragmented Risk Reality”, which spotted an emerging, post-pandemic legal risk pattern and linked it to three practical approaches for how in-house teams can enable business adaptation – namely through building agility, smarter horizon scanning, and more effective use of external resources.

In October 2021, Lex Mundi managed to seize a window in time between pandemic waves to gather a group of experts, general counsel, and law firm partners in Munich for a two-day summit, which afforded participants the chance to compare approaches to providing legal guidance to company management, business teams, and boards.

This report combines redacted insights from Lex Mundi’s consultations with general counsel and observations from its successful Munich Summit, along with additional research and analysis it has conducted. Lex Mundi are providing, for the benefit of broader dissemination among the in-house counsel community and to encourage best practice sharing during its general counsel roundtable series throughout 2022. Louis Barbier, Partner at SquareWell Partners, is featured in the articles from speakers at the Summit on the topics of shareholder activism, ESG investment trends, and human rights compliance.

The report explores a shift toward a new model of ‘stakeholder governance’ and what it means for general counsel. The full report can be accessed here.