Patricia Savin, environmental law attorney at DS Avocats: “In logistics, the law must necessarily be practiced pragmatically and without dogmatism”

“It is necessary to have a legal, technical and operational understanding of the issues related to logistics and warehouses in particular. Practicing law in logistics real estate requires cross-functional and multidisciplinary knowledge, says Patricia Savin, an environmental law attorney at DS Avocats. You need a complete view of the facts, the site, the premises, the units: number of tenants, business sector, building configuration…. Only this technical and operational understanding will make it possible to provide useful legal advice.” Patricia Savin believes it is essential to move beyond siloed thinking and bring together everyone concerned before proposing a legal path forward. “The winning team to assemble is a technical, operational and legal team. In addition to business law, logistics real estate notably involves regulations governing facilities classified for environmental protection (ICPE), waste law…. Drafting or analyzing a lease must take into account the ICPE administrative requirements applicable to the warehouse. Thinking otherwise can lead to dead ends.” She recalls a case in which the owner, who was also the legal operator, had to ensure compliance with the terms of an ICPE prefectural order setting maximum storage quantities in the warehouse. “The leases signed with the four tenants required compliance with the terms of the prefectural order, but without allocating the maximum quantities among the tenants! Yet the cumulative storage by tenant, in full compliance with the leases, could have put the legal operator in breach of the prefectural order, facing a formal notice and administrative and criminal penalties, with no possible action against tenants who were complying with their leases. A solution was found… but this example demonstrates the importance of reconciling lease law and ICPE regulations.”

Patricia Savin’s daily work is divided between advisory services, litigation management, training and auditing as President of DS Avocats’ subsidiary dedicated to ESG issues, DS Durabilité. “Often, the need for training becomes apparent after a dispute, she comments. When it comes to sustainability, companies prefer to anticipate, aware of the great complexity of the various directives.” In her view, the interest of the cases she handles comes from the fact that “there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Every site, every environment, every tenant is different. For each case, we must be pragmatic and avoid all dogmatism,” she explains.

Patricia Savin believes she was fortunate to begin practicing environmental law at the start of her career, in 1996, when it was still rarely applied, “because it was poorly understood in business law,” she comments. “Yet the legal framework has existed for a long time. In 1917, for example, a law concerning dangerous, unhealthy or inconvenient establishments, which took into account the concept of pollution, imposed more or less the same constraints as those governing ICPE facilities today.” Regulatory developments in recent years, with the goal of carbon neutrality by 2050, are increasingly prompting the business world and public policy to give this aspect of the law serious consideration.

As an independent third-party organization (OTI) since 2016 (issuing opinions on non-financial performance declarations and purpose-driven companies), DS Avocats is also listed with the Haute Autorité de l’Audit (H2A) for audits of CSRD sustainability reports. To distinguish advisory work from verification work, particularly under the CSRD, the DS Durabilité subsidiary was created in 2024, with Patricia Savin and Yvon Martinet, President of DS Avocats, as individual partners; both are listed with the H2A as verifiers. “In our OTI assignments, we assess the truthfulness and compliance of the non-financial information in the ESG reports of companies subject to these requirements, the ‘sustainability reports,’” she explains. This sustainability-verifier expertise provides in-depth ESG knowledge and, in the context of advisory assignments, enables additional training in laws that can sometimes be difficult to grasp because they are so complex. DS Avocats is also a signatory of the United Nations Global Compact, which offers its participants a framework for voluntary commitments to corporate social responsibility and helps align the French business world with the 2030 Agenda and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

What makes the practice of law in logistics both complex and interesting is that this sector is sometimes poorly understood by the courts. “It is our responsibility to explain the cumulative nature of administrative and contractual liabilities, and of the applicable regulations (lease law, ICPE regulations, waste law, etc.), Patricia Savin notes. If the owner is the legal operator, tenants are generally the de facto operators. As such, they have their own contractual liability or liability under waste law, for example... ” As with environmental law, recognition of the specific features of the logistics world is progressing… although it remains imperfect.