The president of Albatross Foundation and Albatross Legal was interviewed for Harvard Law School’s World Class News Letter published in July 2024:
“Everything we wanted to do was possible”.
Ghislaine Bouillet Cordonnier LL.M. ’90
As an LL.M. student, Ghislaine was “highly motivated by a career as a corporate finance lawyer”, focusing her courses on finance, securities regulation and corporate law. These courses helped her earn her doctorate in corporate finance and venture capital. Looking back, she feels that she should have taken courses to broaden her mind and open her mind, as evidenced by the fact that at an LL.M. ’90 alumni reunion last May in Madrid, bringing together students from 23 countries, several of them were still talking about the “Thinking about Thinking” course they had taken with Professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger LL.M. ’70 S.J.D. ’76. That said, Ghislaine thoroughly enjoyed the “Negotiation Workshop” course with Professor Roger Fisher LL.B. ’48, which involved a week-long intensive collaboration between HLS and the Harvard Kennedy School, during which over 100 participants, representing their home countries, read, analyzed, voted on and defended their positions on the environmental issues that would be discussed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.
“Of course, the LL.M. gave us the opportunity to learn from great teachers and classmates, and opened the doors to an unparalleled international network,” observes Ghislaine. “But we took away much more than that: we also became more daring. The people around us showed us that whatever we wanted to do was possible. That was a great lesson in life. It gave us tremendous energy to think outside the box and to never take ‘no’ as an answer.”
After graduation, Ghislaine passed the New York bar and forged broader ties with alumni, practicing in Washington, D.C. Working closely with classmate Christian Buehling-Uhle LL.M. ’90, and with the support of lawyers in her professional network (including former U.S. Secretary of Transportation William T. Coleman, Jr. JD ’46, and Ibrahim Shihata S.J.D. ’64 and Herbert Morais LL.M. ’67 S.J.D. ’72 of the World Bank), she co-founded the international section of the Harvard Law School Association, which was launched in 1991.
“I really wanted to travel around the world, in part because of my involvement with the International Section,” she recalls. Over the next 30 years, Ghislaine passed the Paris bar and worked in a law firm in France, at the World Bank in Africa, at UNESCO in Cambodia, in an electronics/nuclear company and at INSEAD in Singapore, and finally as Senior Vice President and General Counsel for Asia-Pacific at Solvay, a Belgian specialty chemicals multinational, in China. Along the way, she and her husband adopted four children. “The kids were complaining because I was traveling all the time. My eldest, Lucille, who was 10 at the time, said to me: ‘Mom, you’re here, you talk about the environment at home, but you work in heavy industry’. So I took her advice!
Ghislaine launched her first CSR project at Solvay, training its employees to work with children and teach them about environmental issues. “We attracted worldwide attention and created momentum with the launch of the initiative at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, under the auspices of the French President himself,” she recalls. After that, she decided to devote herself full-time to similar projects.
In 2014, Ghislaine and her family returned to France where she founded the Albatros Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on educating young people about sustainable development. Among its various projects, the foundation trains trainers on the environment, produces children’s books, teaches children about sustainable agriculture in its eco-labeled garden, and has developed Saphir, a free mobile app (in collaboration with CNRS/Centre national de recherche de France and the Fondation Roi Beaudoin). She is involved with over 15,000 young people in France, China and Brazil. Notably, many of Ghislaine’s classmates have contributed to the foundation’s work, for example by supporting multilingual translations, helping to build the Saphir app and sitting on the board of directors or as advisors.
Ghislaine has set up other businesses, including Albatrosslegal.org, a probono legal platform that won the Paris Bar Association’s Pro Bono Trophy. She also founded Create2donate.org, a philanthropic e-commerce platform. Artists that have supported this work include the famous Paris jeweler Philippe Tournaire, who created an “Albacoin” pendant.
A formerly unoccupied 17th-century château in the Loire Valley now serves as the family home, the headquarters of the Albatros Foundation, an Airbnb providing financial support to the foundation, and an educational garden where children come to attend programs on sustainable agriculture. Ghislaine’s work with the foundation reflects just how transformative the LL.M. is : is transformative: “After all,” laughs Ghislaine, “it gave me enough audacity to quit my job as a senior vice-president, with expatriate amenities, to open a non-profit association and, of course, to adopt four fabulous children with my husband.”
