[LUM#17] Jurigeek: A Career
Simon Mareschal de Charentenay is a legal researcher and blockchain expert. As an advocate for LegalTech, he offers companies an innovative solution for digitizing their financial securities (stocks, bonds, etc.). This technology is used by the MonJuridique.infogreffe platform and was awarded the University of Montpellier’s Innovation Prize in 2020.
“Blockchain has become my specialty,” says Simon Mareschal de Charentenay. “It’s the focus of my research and my passion, and it has led me to become an entrepreneur in this innovative sector. ” And it was to meet the needs of the legal world that this legal researcher, with the help of a few partners, developed a technology to digitize securities registries and general meeting records on a blockchain network. This minor revolution in shareholder management has certainly caught the attention of the industry giant Infogreffe, which markets this product under the name MonJuridique.infogreffe.
Managing Shareholder Relations
“There are currently 3.5 million privately held companies in France. Most of them manage their equity securities using paper documents,” the researcher continues. Equity securities are financial instruments that allow investors to provide funds to a company in exchange for a return. “These paper documents circulate from buyers to sellers or between law firms, carrying a significant risk of loss,” explains the researcher. “Digitization provides a basic level of security, but the real difference comes with blockchain, because it makes ownership of shares legally enforceable. ” By offering greater transparency into the movement of financial securities, MonJuridique.infogreffe has also become a valuable tool for managing shareholder structures, having already attracted more than 18,000 companies since its launch in July 2021.
Professional Hybridity
It was in 2016 that the “blockchain bug” bit the young researcher specializing in legal theory. He entered and navigated this “fascinating” world of geeks armed with his legal expertise. “Blockchain is a normative system in its own right; it’s a kind of autonomous legal system that aims to be an alternative to the traditional legal system. ” Driven by this passion, he met with computer scientists and engineers with whom he launched a startup. The engineers worked on blockchain technology, while the legal scholar sought to “devise new normative frameworks capable of meeting regulatory security needs ”—an effort supported by both his laboratory and the School of Law and Political Science. “ I couldn’t have created this professional hybridity if CERCOP* and my university hadn’t given me the freedom to venture into this complex forest and bring back a few gems.”
Montpellier-Stanford
These gems are now benefiting the Faculty of Law and Political Science, as Simon Mareschal de Charentenay launched a university degree program there in 2021 specializing in LegalTech and certified by Stanford’s Codex—one of the best, if not the best, research centers dedicated to LegalTech in the world. “I call it the Netflix degree: entirely online, open to students of all nationalities, offering an immersion experience in Google’s legal departments, and featuring American professors who film themselves strolling through Silicon Valley… It’s very fresh! ” It’s a
-style approach for this trailblazer to blaze his own trail while demonstrating that a law degree can open the door to “hybrid careers where the university isn’t just a distributor of knowledge but a driver of innovation.” Enough to inspire a whole chain of new careers… one after another.
*CERCOP (UM)
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