About

After approaching ten years in private practice, Eliana Crisafio moved in-house as regional head of legal affairs and compliance at pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim in 2007, before being appointed head of legal for Latin America in early 2012. She directs a team of ten distributed in a non-uniform manner throughout the continent. Given these limited resources, the team has re-assessed its focus on the matters that add most value to the company: standardizing certain procedures, dropping others, and adopting consensually defined best practice models according to the demands of the company’s internal clients. Externally she has been particularly active in assuring adequate patent protection for the company’s products across the region’s differing jurisdictions, something that hasn’t always been in place. Her efforts in this regard (and also in terms of seeking to improve the business environment for the pharmaceutical industry in general), gained recognition when she received the Argentine Pharmaceutical Trade Association’s “ABCD” (Above and Beyond the Call of Duty) award in 2012. On law firms, Crisafio is succinct, suggesting ‘they need to improve their communication skills and speak in straightforward language comprehensible to internal company clients who are not lawyers’, noting that ‘on many occasions I’ve found myself converted into another lawyer’s interpreter’. ‘At this level’, she continues, ‘they should understand that the value of their advice is not in the length of the memo or legal opinion but in its utility for the recipient’.