Securing Strategic Sectors: Insights from McDermott’s Defense & Essential Infrastructure Roundtable

By Bertrand Delafaye, Romain Desmonts, Guillaume Kellner, Charlotte Michellet, Sabine Naugès and Romain Perray on 2025-11-14

Posted In France

In October 2025, McDermott Will & Schulte hosted its Defense & Essential Infrastructure Roundtable, convening leading voices from across government, industry, and finance to discuss the challenges facing Europe’s most sensitive sectors.

The session featured insights from McDermott partners Sabine Naugès, Bertrand Delafaye, Charlotte Michellet, Guillaume Kellner, Romain Desmonts and Romain Perray, who examined how organisations can anticipate regulatory shifts, manage information security, access financing, address fiscal constraints, and strengthen resilience in an era of heightened geopolitical and technological risk.

We were delighted to welcome Nathalie Grimbert, Head of the SME Support Office for the Defence Industrial and Technological Base (BITD) within the Directorate General of Armament (DGA) at the French Ministry of Defence, who shared valuable insights into the government’s role in reviewing foreign investment applications and safeguarding national strategic interests.

While the roundtable covered diverse topics, one central message emerged: operating in or investing in strategic industries demands foresight, coordination, and an ability to navigate complexity across every dimension — legal, financial, and operational.

Click here to read the full takeaways.

Tags: FDI, National Security, Essential Infrastructure, Sovereignty

Bertrand Delafaye
Bertrand Delafaye advises strategic clients and investment funds on complex transactions, including private and public M&A, leveraged buyouts and joint venture transactions. Bertrand has also extensive experience in equity and equity-linked securities offerings, representing issuers, underwriters, and shareholders and more generally in securities and corporate law and corporate governance issues faced by publicly listed companies. He also has significant experience in the international arena, including cross-border M&A transactions.

Romain Desmonts
Romain Desmonts focuses his practice on tax advice to French and multinational companies, with an emphasis on the tax aspects of domestic and cross-border mergers, acquisitions, and group restructurings, as well as indirect tax matters.

Guillaume Kellner
Guillaume Kellner focuses his practice on mergers and acquisitions, private equity, and securities law. He advises investment funds as well as strategic clients on their acquisition, leverage buyouts, and build-up transactions as well as their reorganization both in France and internationally.

Charlotte Michellet
Charlotte Michellet focuses her practice on public, administrative and regulatory law.

Sabine Naugès
Sabine Naugès counsels clients on all aspects of public law, including administrative and regulatory, competition and constitutional law. Among other high-profile clients, Sabine has advised telecommunications companies France Télécom and Orange on regulatory matters in cases before administrative and commercial courts, and before EU and French competition authorities. She also regularly represents major companies with interests in a wide range of industries, including aerospace, energy, oil and gas, and public health care, before the French government and in litigation, in a range of regulatory and administrative matters.

Romain Perray
Romain has extensive experience in data privacy and data protection law, and lectures on these subjects in Master of Law classes at the University of Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne, the University of Paris-II Panthéon-Assas and the University of Paris V Cité.

Securing Strategic Sectors: Insights from McDermott’s Defense & Essential Infrastructure Roundtable

Related Posts

BLOG EDITORS

STAY CONNECTED

TOPICS

ARCHIVES

RECENT POSTS