France Teams 2019
| Sanofi
Sanofi
Organised around the three pillars of legal, IP and ethics and business integrity, and overseen by the well-known and highly regarded Karen Linehan, the Sanofi legal department is among the best-resourced legal teams in the world. Overall, the function’s complement is approximately 600 persons globally. Over the past two years the legal team has supported some major acquisitions, including those of Bioverativ and Ablynx, and the finance legal team supported the largest Euro denominated bond issue ever completed by a French corporation, and the fourth largest Eurobond issue in history overall, with an aggregate principal amount of €8bn. The team has also worked on a number of simplification and resource-optimisation projects. ‘We reviewed the legal involvement in contractual activities and worked with the Sanofi global procurement team to revisit the contract lifecycle management, creating and optimised P2P process’, says Linehan. ‘We also redesigned our IP support and implemented an end-to-end solution to optimise the management of law firm billing’. Harnessing technology is clearly at the forefront of the team’s thinking and is seen as a major driver for increased efficiency within the team going forward. ‘With the emergence of new technologies and the tools they provide, I see legal accelerating the focus on high-level expertise matters. Some tasks that are traditionally handled by legal are or will be managed by other teams, outsourced or automated. This is notably the case for most usual contracts, IP portfolio prosecution and maintenance and the management of external providers. Overall, legal teams will benefit from the time this frees up to focus on tasks that provide greater value to the business, and increase their business and commercial expertise’. Summing up, Linehan makes it clear just how seriously the team takes its work, and how mindful it is of its duties in the sensitive healthcare sector: ‘In a healthcare company, our responsibility as lawyers is broader than just the individual file we are working on. We know that what we do can contribute to changing a person’s life. We could have worked in any industry and in many companies, but we choose to work at Sanofi because it is uniquely positioned as a diversified healthcare company and we are motivated every day to help others in their life journey’.
