Legal notices for a French training organisation's website: the checklist

A prospective trainee is torn between two training providers found on EDOF, France’s public training-funding platform. Out of habit, they open both websites in separate tabs and scroll to the bottom to check “who’s behind this.” On the first site, a “Legal Notices” link leads to a page left blank for six months. On the second, there’s nothing at all. This detail, trivial as it may seem, is one of the few checkpoints French law explicitly imposes on any professional website — well before Qualiopi or labour law even come into play. Here is what a training organisation’s website must contain to be compliant, and what it costs to ignore it.

Why the LCEN applies to your training organisation’s website

The obligation to publish legal notices does not come from labour law or from the National Quality Framework underlying Qualiopi, but from law no. 2004-575 of 21 June 2004 for confidence in the digital economy (LCEN). It applies to any individual or entity publishing a website as part of a professional activity — a training organisation, whatever its legal form, is fully covered, even if it sells nothing online and simply presents its course catalogue.

Law no. 2024-449 of 21 May 2024 (the “SREN” law), which transposed the EU Digital Services Act into French law, restructured the LCEN: the identification requirement, formerly at article 6-III, now sits at article 1-2. The substance hasn’t changed: a professional website must let any visitor immediately identify who publishes it and who hosts it, without having to hunt for the information.

The complete list of mandatory notices

This information must appear on a dedicated page, reachable in one click from any screen on the site — typically via a footer link.

If you operate as a company

• corporate name and, where applicable, trading name;
• legal form (French equivalents of an LLC, sole-shareholder company, etc.);
• share capital;
• registered office address;
• company registration number (RCS) and SIREN number;
• name of the publication director (typically the legal representative);
• contact details (email address or phone number);
• EU VAT number, if applicable.

If you operate as a sole trader or micro-entrepreneur

Training organisations set up as sole proprietorships or micro-entrepreneurs must display their full name, their business address — that of their registered agent if applicable —, their SIREN number, and their contact details. Not having share capital or a corporate structure does not exempt you from any of the other notices.

Information about your host

The LCEN also requires identifying the site’s host: corporate name, address and contact details. This is the most commonly forgotten notice even though it is explicitly required by law; you’ll find it within seconds in your hosting or website-builder account dashboard.

Cookies and trackers: what the CNIL requires

As soon as your site drops cookies or trackers that are not strictly necessary to deliver the service the user requested — non-exempt audience measurement, embedded maps or videos, social-sharing buttons — you must obtain the user’s prior consent. The CNIL’s doctrine, reaffirmed in its most recent recommendations, sets three requirements for a compliant banner: a “Reject” button as visible and accessible as the “Accept” button, purposes presented clearly and broken down by category, and the ability to withdraw consent as easily as it was given. A banner offering only “Accept,” with the reject option hidden behind a “learn more” link, does not comply.

Cookies strictly necessary for the site’s technical operation (login basket, language preference, security) are exempt from this prior-consent requirement.

Legal notices, terms of sale, privacy policy: who does what

Three distinct documents, often confused with one another, must coexist on a training organisation’s website:

Document	Role	Legal basis
Legal notices	Identify the site’s publisher and host	LCEN, art. 1-2
Terms of sale	Govern the commercial relationship (price, withdrawal, complaints)	Consumer Code
Privacy policy	Inform users about personal-data processing	GDPR

These three pages must remain accessible from every page of the site, not buried in a secondary menu. Our detailed GDPR obligations for a training organisation spell out what the privacy policy should cover, particularly for data collected through a contact or enrolment form.

The link with Qualiopi indicator 1

Beyond the legal obligation, an up-to-date website directly supports your Qualiopi compliance. Indicator 1 of the National Quality Framework requires that the public have clear information about your services, prices, access times and terms — for most organisations today, the website is the first checkpoint an auditor verifies. A broken “Legal Notices” page or a missing privacy policy doesn’t automatically create a non-conformity against this indicator, but it feeds the doubts of an auditor already scrutinising the overall consistency of your mandatory documents.

Penalties for non-compliance

Failing to identify the publisher or host, as required by article 1-2 of the LCEN, is punishable by up to one year’s imprisonment and a €75,000 fine for an individual, raised to €375,000 for a legal entity under the French Criminal Code’s fine-multiplication rule for corporate offenders. In practice, criminal prosecutions remain rare and mostly target serious or repeated breaches; the more common risk is a formal notice from the DGCCRF (consumer protection authority) or the CNIL, giving a deadline to comply. The risk is nonetheless real: fixing a legal-notices page takes a few minutes, while ignoring it exposes you to a penalty wildly disproportionate to the effort of compliance.

What the research says about consent banners

Cookie banner design is not a cosmetic detail: a study by Nouwens, Liccardi, Veale, Karger and Kagal, presented at the CHI 2020 conference and examining the five leading consent-management platforms used across 10,000 UK websites, found that only 11.8% of the banners observed met the minimum requirements of European law, and that interface choices as simple as removing the reject button from the first screen increased consent rates by 22 to 23 percentage points (study on Google Scholar). For a training organisation, the lesson is direct: a poorly designed cookie banner isn’t just a legal risk — to an attentive trainee or funder, it’s also a signal about how seriously you handle data overall.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Copying another site’s legal notices without adapting them to your own legal structure, sometimes leaving a third party’s name displayed with no connection to your organisation.
• Forgetting the host while correctly identifying the publisher — the single most common omission, and the easiest to fix.
• Failing to update the page after a change in legal form, a change of registered address, or a change of director.
• Confusing the cookie banner with the privacy policy: the former collects consent before any tracker is dropped, the latter informs users about all data processing, including processing that has nothing to do with cookies.

Take action

The administrative checklist in the Complete Kit Certif at €297 (14-day guarantee) includes ready-to-adapt templates for legal notices, terms of sale and a privacy policy tailored to your structure. Just launching your organisation? The ebook Create Your Training Organisation in 30 Days at €67 details every start-up administrative obligation, and the Kit + Ebook Pack at €347 combines both.