Regional Head of Litigation — URSSAF Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
Achievements
Building a regional legal function
- Creation and scaling up of the Regional Litigation Service: the team grew from 2.2 FTEs to 8 FTEs, with regional centralisation of appeals and cases before the Court of Cassation.
- Bringing in-house the handling of proceedings involving judicial reorganisation and liquidation, disputed claims and cases before the commercial courts at the Marseille office, which had previously been outsourced to law firms. This generated substantial savings on high-volume, low-complexity litigation and restored control over the policy on initiating proceedings.
- Reorganisation of anti-fraud units into a single regional cell.
- Recruitment and professionalisation: creation and filling of hearing officer, legal adviser and back-office positions through a professionalised recruitment process including written selection tests and situational interviews.
Industrialising operations
- Implementation of a legal safeguard process for observation letters: nearly 150 letters secured per quarter.
- Systematic preparation of recommendations on whether to appeal or bring a case before the Court of Cassation, submitted to the director.
- Bulk handling of serial litigation: Social Security monopoly, FNAL, opposition to enforcement.
- Overhaul of relations with the courts: dematerialised exchanges and procedural calendars negotiated with the Bouches-du-Rhône TASS and the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal.
- Structuring of external provider use: briefing note for law firms, tailored public procurement for 'legal advice, assistance and representation' (including criminal lot), monitoring of the organisation's law firms on 60 to 70 annual cases over €100,000.
Handling very high-stakes litigation
- Management of a regional portfolio of more than 3,000 new TASS cases per year and more than 2,500 cases concluded, for a total financial stake exceeding €194 million.
- Management of more than 520 cases before the Court of Appeal and 45 cases before the Court of Cassation.
- Management of major financial litigation involving several million euros, including cases that led to the following decisions:
- CA Aix-en-Provence, 14th Ch., 25 August 2017; Cass. 2nd Civ., 20 December 2018, no. 17-26.958 (partial quashing, published in the Bulletin).
- CA Aix-en-Provence, 25 February 2016; Cass. 2nd Civ., 24 May 2017, no. 16-15.724 (appeal dismissed, published in the Bulletin).
My role
Experience at URSSAF PACA
I joined a recently regionalised URSSAF. The six former departmental URSSAFs each had their own legal department and retained strong local specificities. The former departmental directors nevertheless continued to steer their 'departmental site', which had to be taken into account in designing the regional level. In this context, creating a regional level responsible for defining common directions and organising litigation activity was a major challenge.
I first carried out a site-by-site diagnosis and a study of workloads and available resources.
From the outset, I organised the legal department around two levels:
- A regional level based at headquarters in Marseille, responsible for handling the most complex cases and made up of litigation inspectors who had volunteered and had expertise suited to this type of case. This department had exclusive jurisdiction over court proceedings, excluding the CRA.
- A departmental level responsible for other disputes and the drafting of CRA decisions.
To gain efficiency while preserving a 'local margin', activity was organised as follows:
- Appeals and cases before the Court of Cassation were handled at the regional level.
- First-instance cases were handled at the departmental level.
This arrangement helped reduce travel and therefore litigation costs, by reserving hearings before the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal — competent for around 90% of appeal litigation — for staff based in Marseille.
However, this arrangement soon revealed certain limitations. Excluding 'high-stakes cases' from the regional scope and keeping them on departmental sites prevented other departments (Production, RAF, Control) from having a clearly identified point of contact among the regional lawyers. This complicated cross-departmental cooperation.
Since these cases were followed directly at my level and, for the most part, by the regional management, I was responsible for defining the litigation strategy in line with the director's guidelines. Managing staff attached to local sites was then more difficult, because it was not only a matter of informing and explaining the chosen strategy, but also of discussing its relevance with the local director.
I therefore quickly proposed moving URSSAF PACA towards an approach based more on financial stakes and consequently broadening the scope of the regional level. This proposal was not accepted, however, as the arbitration favoured maintaining local governance balances.