Seconda, collective intelligence to elevate your legal expertise
A month with Seconda
Welcome to the April-May 2026 newsletter !
This month, we :
We're sharing with you our work at the Squair firm , as well as a little surprise .
We present to you Laura Monnier , a lawyer specializing in environmental and criminal law,
We'll give you a detailed report this month on the obligations for decontaminating a clay pigeon shooting range.
We are questioning the relationship between consumer protection and jurisdiction clauses in the international legal order.
and we recommend Sorj Chalandon's "L'Enragé" .
Enjoy your reading!
What's new at Seconda?
Seconda on display at Squair
On May 12th, we were at Squair to present Seconda to the firm's partners.
Squair is a business law firm founded in 2019, now comprising 125 lawyers across ten offices in France. An agile structure, composed exclusively of partners, Squair practices in all areas of business law.
What makes the meeting natural: Squair masters its core business but its clients sometimes have problems that go beyond business law (customs law, equine law, private international family law...) or that require the intervention of academics.
This is where Seconda comes in, with profiles that Squair doesn't have within its ranks. For a firm like Squair, Seconda isn't a competitor: it's a discreet and tailored resource, available when the case requires it.
The presentation was held in a hybrid format — part of the teams gathered at the Paris headquarters, others connected from regional offices.
Proof that collective intelligence, at Squair as at Seconda, knows no boundaries!
Seconda.fr has a new look!
Launched in May 2023, our website was definitely due for a little update.
While our site obviously retains what has made it a hallmark (a clean design, the presentation of the Secondants and of course the drawings...), it has been redesigned to be even more accessible and lively: a simple and effective homepage, a presentation of how Seconda works at the pace of the customer journey, a page dedicated to all our communication actions and even FAQs with a very...Seconda tone!
The launch is scheduled for the second week of June, but we've prepared some exclusive excerpts for you; we hope you'll like them!
Laura is a lawyer specializing in environmental and criminal law.
Secondant of the Month
This month, we're featuring Laura Monnier!
Whether advising states on their regulatory frameworks or providing on-call criminal defense services on a weekday evening, Laura intervenes wherever criminal risk and compliance issues intersect, without prioritizing her cases.
Last summer, Laura conducted several assessment and consulting missions abroad, focusing on
This month, we're featuring Laura Monnier!
Whether advising states on their regulatory frameworks or providing on-call criminal defense services on a weekday evening, Laura intervenes wherever criminal risk and compliance issues intersect, without prioritizing her cases.
Last summer, Laura conducted several assessment and consulting missions abroad, focusing on environmental legislation, to assist candidate states for European Union membership in analyzing their level of compliance with EU requirements.
"This isn't theoretical advice: we very concretely assess what works, what's lacking, what's problematic, and we see what needs to be done to address it."
In parallel, Laura is developing a relatively unexplored area of expertise: nuclear law, and more specifically, the chain of responsibility for companies involved in the manufacture of nuclear equipment. Uranium supply, industrial compliance, cascading subcontracting: the subject is technical, sensitive, and surprisingly under-documented from a legal standpoint.
“The ultimate responsibility rests with the operator, even though part of the manufacturing process is subcontracted to companies that aren’t necessarily familiar with the requirements of these regulations.”
This work is informed by long-standing monitoring, particularly based on alerts issued by the Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection Authority. Laura will also be speaking on July 3rd at the EFB (École de Formation du Bassin de Paris), alongside Yvon Martinet, as part of a nuclear law training course integrated into a series on litigation strategies in environmental law.
Laura also tutors at Sciences Po on a sensitive issue: the duty of discretion incumbent upon civil servants in the face of environmental emergencies.
“We’ve talked a lot about the duty of discretion from the perspective of secularism, but a public servant’s stance on environmental issues is also a political opinion. So we try to prepare them to address environmental issues in their work, while remaining within the bounds of the law.”
environmental legislation, to assist candidate states for European Union membership in analyzing their level of compliance with EU requirements.
"This isn't theoretical advice: we very concretely assess what works, what's lacking, what's problematic, and we see what needs to be done to address it."
In parallel, Laura is developing a relatively unexplored area of expertise: nuclear law, and more specifically, the chain of responsibility for companies involved in the manufacture of nuclear equipment. Uranium supply, industrial compliance, cascading subcontracting: the subject is technical, sensitive, and surprisingly under-documented from a legal standpoint.
“The ultimate responsibility rests with the operator, even though part of the manufacturing process is subcontracted to companies that aren’t necessarily familiar with the requirements of these regulations.”
This work is informed by long-standing monitoring, particularly based on alerts issued by the Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection Authority. Laura will also be speaking on July 3rd at the EFB (École de Formation du Bassin de Paris), alongside Yvon Martinet, as part of a nuclear law training course integrated into a series on litigation strategies in environmental law.
Laura also tutors at Sciences Po on a sensitive issue: the duty of discretion incumbent upon civil servants in the face of environmental emergencies.
“We’ve talked a lot about the duty of discretion from the perspective of secularism, but a public servant’s stance on environmental issues is also a political opinion. So we try to prepare them to address environmental issues in their work, while remaining within the bounds of the law.”
The dossier of the month
Context
A company operating a clay pigeon shooting range plans to sell its business.
Prior to the sale, the town hall sent him a letter urging him to inform them of the procedures for collecting and processing his waste, particularly used cartridges and lead.
> Question(s)
What are the operator's obligations in terms of
pollution cleanup?
Does the Town Hall have the authority to send such a letter?
Can the land be sold "as is" in any case?
> Deliverable
A summary note detailing:
the various obligations that fall on both the operator and the owner with regard to pollution control, waste management and soil rehabilitation;
the administrative police powers of the Town Hall and its authorization to send such a letter;
the possibility, or not, of the owner selling the land "as is" and, if so, under what conditions.
The crew
A lawyer at the court specializing in environmental law and a lawyer's associate at the Councils, specializing in public law.
> Timeframe/Cost
3 days / €1,500 excluding VAT
Question of the month
Consumer protection and jurisdiction clauses in the international order: how do they interact?
In three rulings dated March 25, 2026, the French Court of Cassation established a new rule of private international law: in the case of a contract concluded with a consumer, the consumer cannot be deprived, by a jurisdiction clause designating a foreign court, of the right to bring proceedings before French courts, if they are domiciled in France on the date the initial pleading is filed.
While the rulings were issued against the backdrop of the Lebanese banking crisis, in a context of crisis where depositors were deprived of the return of their assets, the decision is nonetheless formulated in general terms, and its scope therefore extends well beyond this specific scenario.
The novelty of this ruling is notable in three respects.
First, the decision introduces an unprecedented nuance to the principle of the legality of jurisdiction clauses in international law.
Second, the solution is far from being a transposition of domestic law.
Indeed, Article R. 631-3 of the French Consumer Code establishes the jurisdiction of the court of the place where the consumer resided at the time the contract was concluded—not at the time the proceedings were initiated.
Finally, the Brussels I bis Regulation does provide for the jurisdiction of the court of the consumer's domicile when the professional is established in a third country. However, this requires that the professional has directed its activities toward the European Union.
Yet, precisely, the judgments of March 25, 2026, concerned account agreements concluded with a Lebanese bank that had not directed its activities toward the European Union.
What to make of this?
Some legal scholars criticize a solution that could thwart the legitimate expectations of professionals: while they know the address of their contracting party at the time the contract is concluded, they cannot anticipate where the latter will be domiciled when, potentially several years later, they decide to take legal action. This is especially true when the professional has not chosen to base their business activities in France.
Conversely, it is argued that this is precisely the purpose of protective jurisdiction rules: to offer the weaker party an effective procedural advantage in accessing the courts. This protection would lose much of its effectiveness if it remained fixed at the consumer's address at the time the contract was concluded.
So, is this an excessive advantage or a welcome procedural protection for the consumer?
Let's hear your thoughts! The debate is open.
Partagez votre avis en ligne
A film, an exhibition, a restaurant…
A gripping and poignant book about the true story of the last children's prison.
On August 27, 1934, fifty-six children escaped from the juvenile penal colony on Belle-Île-en-Mer. A manhunt was immediately organized: police officers, farmers, prison guards, and tourists, all enticed by the twenty-franc reward offered for each captured child.
All were recaptured. Except for one.
It is to this missing boy that Chalandon gives a name, a voice, a life: Jules, with thirteen years of abandonment and seven years of hard labor behind him.
The novel recounts the failure of the juvenile penal colonies established by the law of August 5, 1850. This law, however, had the laudable objective of ending the incarceration of minors with adults and providing moral, religious, and vocational training to the inmates.
But in reality, for nearly a century, children, often abandoned rather than delinquent, were subjected to a purely repressive system: forced labor, corporal punishment, and isolation.
It was only with the ordinance of February 2, 1945, that a definitive break occurred: education became the rule, incarceration the exception, and the care of minors was removed from the prison administration. The preamble to this landmark text clearly defines its philosophy: "France does not have enough children to allow it to neglect everything that can make them healthy individuals."
The power of Chalandon's novel lies precisely in the gap between the stated ambition of the 1850 law (to educate rather than punish) and its lived reality (forced labor, violence, and the conflation of situations).
Jules is not a victim of a regime that acknowledges its barbarity; he is a victim of a regime that believes itself to be virtuous. And perhaps that is what makes the book all the more unbearable.
Ninety-five years of legal silence. The 1934 escape and the ensuing press scandal at least had the merit of bringing to light what the law perpetuated in the shadows; Jacques Prévert would later draw inspiration from it for his poem "The Hunt for the Child."
Chalandon, a seasoned reporter by training and a former witness in the Barbie trial, knows exactly what to do with this material. Through the eyes of Jules—this broken boy, full of hatred and life—he draws the reader into the everyday horror of a legal system that crushed children in the name of their rehabilitation.
And as in all his books, Chalandon writes about people like no one else: not as symbols, not as abstract victims, but as beings of flesh and blood, filled with anger, trying to survive in a world that has made no provision for them.
A great novel.
Thank you for reading.
That's all you need to know for this month, see you next month!
And to make sure you don't miss anything, remember to subscribe , for those who haven't already!
See you very soon!
Fred-Eric and Neda
