Battery and gigafactory project counsel.

Construction. The EPC contract is the plant’s constitution, and its live clauses are the ones that operate after the ground-breaking: change orders, delay damages, acceptance testing, and the consultation obligations that attach when scope moves. Volkswagen’s PowerCo confirmed to its works council on 11 September 2024 that Salzgitter would proceed with one production line of 20 GWh rather than the two lines totaling 40 GWh originally planned, with series production still starting in 2025 (electrive, September 2024). A halving of installed capacity mid-build is an EPC and supply-contract renegotiation run against a live schedule, not a permitting matter, and the lawyer who wrote the permit application is rarely the one who can reprice the contract.

Technology license. This is the file that changed character most in the last two years. Ford owns the Marshall, Michigan plant outright while CATL licenses chemistry, product design and manufacturing process without holding equity, as CarNewsChina reported in June 2026 — a structure chosen for control rather than for tax. Since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed on 4 July 2025, that structure is also an eligibility test: the Bipartisan Policy Center’s 2026 explainer sets out that the American production credit is unavailable where a licensor retains contractual rights to direct operations or to specify sources of components, and Morgan Lewis described the same effective-control standard in March 2026. IRS Notice 2026-15, issued on 12 February 2026, then made it annual: a material assistance cost ratio of 60 percent for components sold in 2026, rising to 85 percent from 2030 (McGuireWoods, March 2026). Section 45X, the United States production credit finalized in October 2024, is the mirror instrument on the other side of that test.

Two more things sit in the license file. Transport & Environment documented in February 2025 that roughly EUR 900 million of Hungarian and Polish aid to two Asian-backed battery projects, and about EUR 300 million of Spanish aid to a Stellantis-CATL joint venture, carried no EU-wide or national technology-transfer requirement at all: whatever transfer occurs is the transfer somebody drafted. And the know-how travels with people. The trade-secret dispute between LG Energy Solution and SK Innovation produced a ten-year import exclusion order at the United States International Trade Commission and settled in April 2021 for USD 1.8 billion in cash and running royalties (Latham & Watkins).

State aid. The money arrives conditioned. The two battery Important Projects of Common European Interest — approved on 9 December 2019 for up to EUR 3.2 billion across 17 companies in seven member states, and on 26 January 2021 for up to EUR 2.9 billion across 42 companies in twelve, per the European Commission — are the frame; plant-specific grants sit under it. The German aid for the Heide plant, cleared by the Commission in January 2024 at EUR 902 million, carried a disbursement deadline of 31 December 2025 and an explicit matching condition: the aid could not exceed what the sponsor could demonstrably obtain for the equivalent investment in the United States (Silicon Canals). One clause, and an American incentive regime becomes a live input into a German file. A second enforcement track runs alongside: the Commission opened a review of an investment of roughly EUR 4 billion in Hungary under the Foreign Subsidies Regulation, as DIGITIMES reported in March 2025.

Supply-chain compliance. Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 entered into force on 18 February 2024. Carbon-footprint declarations for electric-vehicle batteries have applied since 18 February 2025; the due-diligence policy obligation applies from 18 August 2027 above a EUR 40 million net-turnover threshold, with Commission guidelines due on 27 July 2026 (Cooley, October 2025); the battery passport follows on 18 February 2027 (Minespider). Germany added its own layer when the Bundestag passed the Batterierecht-EU-Anpassungsgesetz on 11 September 2025, aligning national collection and take-back rules to the regulation (KPMG Law). A plant in Germany therefore tracks two instruments with two owners, and the European Court of Auditors noted in Special Report 04/2026, published on 2 February 2026, that lengthy and complex permitting remains a significant bottleneck for the raw-material projects feeding those plants.

Seven of those 24 closed mandates were industrial project seats: counsel for companies building or supplying battery and adjacent manufacturing plants in Germany and Central Europe. Six produced a hire. One did not, because the sponsor paused the plant and withdrew the brief before shortlist. Across the seven, our mandate telemetry records a median of 13 working days from offer to acceptance and counter-offer incidence of 32 percent — the same figures our London in-house book carries as a whole, because these candidates are counter-offered by employers who have only just worked out what the seat is worth.

Five of the seven briefs reached us after construction had already started. That is the least flattering fact in our own data: by the time the interface is defined, the EPC contract is signed, the aid conditions are accepted and the supplier cascade is half built, so the first year of the seat reconstructs a record instead of writing one. Sartori’s quarterly survey, running since 2019, put the reporting-line question to 44 European industrial legal buyers across the two waves since January 2026: 29 said the plant seat should sit in group legal with a dotted line to the site, and the reason they gave was almost always the license rather than the construction contract.

Where the file lands is a different answer. Of the 96 general counsel, heads of legal and legal directors in the manufacturing subgroup of that same interview cohort, 34 said the state-aid reporting calendar arrives in the legal function as a finance deliverable with a legal signature block, which is how a continuing condition becomes an annual surprise. A general counsel at a European cell manufacturer with two plants in build put it plainly: she found out what the aid conditions required in the month the first reporting milestone fell due, because until then the file had been a treasury spreadsheet.

The second testimony came from the supply side. The head of legal at a battery-equipment supplier described the hiring test as one question — “who signs the change order” — and said that every candidate who answered it with a threshold and an escalation route was worth interviewing, and every candidate who answered it with a policy was not. A chief legal officer at an automotive group added the third: the license is the one file he cannot push down to the plant, because a clause that satisfies a European aid file can fail an American eligibility test in the same quarter, and the plant has no visibility of either.

Two engagements, described by category only. A European cell manufacturer with a plant in build in Germany briefed us for a construction lawyer and hired a project legal lead instead: one seat reporting to the group general counsel, with signature authority over change orders up to a defined threshold and ownership of the aid reporting calendar. Five months from brief to signed contract, one counter-offer, accepted. Separately, a battery-equipment supplier shipping machinery into two Central European plants asked for compliance counsel and discovered in the interviews that its live exposure was warranty and delay under back-to-back supply contracts. Four months, one hire on the commercial side, the compliance work bought in on a fixed scope.