Business lawyer in Paris, 7th arrondissement

Paris is not a branch of the firm: it is its head office. Selarl Boissière Pujol Avocats is registered with the registre du commerce et des sociétés of Paris, the French trade and companies register, and Me Jérôme Pujol is admitted to the Paris Bar as well as to that of the Pyrénées-Orientales.

The office occupies an address in the 7^th arrondissement, between the Champ-de-Mars and the Seine. People come by appointment, about a business matter: the address is not a shopfront, it is a place to bring a company director, their partners and their advisers around one table.

Me Pujol was admitted to the Bar in 2000. He holds a master's degree from ESSEC and began his career with Gide Loyrette Nouel, a Paris business law firm, in its Bucharest office. The full background and the way we work are set out elsewhere.

In Paris, the company on the other side almost always has a lawyer, and often an in-house legal department. So the point is not to explain what a shareholders' agreement is, but to negotiate the one put in front of you, clause by clause, on a timetable that is not yours.

Four triggers recur:

• an investor joins the share capital — term sheet, due diligence, and the concessions are made at the start: this is the ground of articles of association, the shareholders' agreement and governance;
• a large customer imposes its framework agreement — payment periods, penalties, exclusivity, ownership of developments;
• a foreign group opens a French subsidiary, or a French group sets up outside France;
• a handover is being prepared, and it is the structuring of wealth and its cost that dictates the timetable.

In all four cases, the scope, the timescale and the amount are agreed in writing before the work begins. If one of them is yours, it is better to talk to us before the position hardens.

Commercial law governs what two businesses have promised each other, and what happens when one of them stops delivering.

Beforehand, the clause that will decide everything is drafted while all is well: applicable law, court having jurisdiction — two traders may validly designate their own (art. 48 of the French Code of Civil Procedure) — payment period, limitation of liability, exit. That is the substantive work on your contracts and your terms of sale.

During the relationship, ending an established commercial relationship without sufficient written notice makes the party doing so liable (art. L. 442-1, II of the French Commercial Code) — provided its length and volume can be established. That is the ground of abrupt termination and unfair competition. Afterwards, obligations arising between traders are time-barred after five years (art. L. 110-4 of the same code).

Two facts of judicial geography explain why this office matters. On 1 January 2025 the tribunal de commerce of Paris became the tribunal des activités économiques de Paris, the economic activities court — one of the twelve courts in the pilot scheme opened by Act no. 2023-1059 of 20 November 2023 and Decree no. 2024-674 of 3 July 2024 — and its jurisdiction now covers the amicable and collective insolvency procedures of almost all economic actors. And disputes based on restrictive practices can be appealed only to the Paris Court of Appeal (art. D. 442-3 of the French Commercial Code): a business in Lille or Bayonne whose case takes that route ends up in Paris, whoever its first-instance lawyer may be.

It is the Paris office that puts together transactions crossing a border: an international file is decided where the group, the bank or the investor sits, and it is performed elsewhere.

At the structuring stage, what gets settled is the language of the contract, the applicable law, the security that accompanies payment, the flows between parent and subsidiary, and how disputes are to be resolved — by a judge or by an arbitrator. The International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce has sat in Paris since 1923, which makes the ICC clause the most common in international contracts; an award made under its auspices is recognised in more than 170 states through the New York Convention of 10 June 1958. Confidential and not subject to appeal, arbitration is also more expensive to start: it is decided in the drafting, never in the dispute.

Where the transaction touches Spain, performance goes through our Barcelona office. Elsewhere, the firm relies on a network of selected partners for the local law it does not practise — and it says so at the first conversation, which serves to establish whether the transaction can be handled from Paris, within what timescale and at what cost.

The seven areas are practised identically from all three offices; their weight differs. From Paris, three come first: commercial contracts, through which large-customer files arrive; corporate law, because capital transactions are put together here; and wealth and tax, because a sale is prepared years in advance. Intellectual property and GDPR compliance follow, driven by services and technology businesses. Two areas, on the other hand, that we do not handle: business criminal law and public business law.

The office is in the 7^tharrondissement. The exact address, the telephone number and the email address appear in the “Contact details” box on this page — the same ones everywhere on the site. It is reached by metro (line 8, École Militaire station) or by RER C (Pont de l'Alma station); on-street parking is difficult.

Appointments are booked online and are held at the office or by video call. In Paris, the obstacle is not distance but the diary: a one-hour meeting often costs a company director three, and most first conversations work perfectly well remotely.