About

After training with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in London, Damien Moynagh qualified into the firm’s corporate team, working on public and private M&A transactions before secondments to the Tokyo and New York offices. He moved back to Freshfields’ London office before returning to Ireland in 2010, joining the corporate team at Maples and Calder in Dublin. After some time he decided to take the plunge in-house, taking on the role of chief operating officer and general counsel at Sysnet Global Solutions. After five years, he assumed his current role at UDG Healthcare, a FTSE-250 listed company supporting the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors that employs almost 9,000 people in over 25 countries. In addition to looking after the group’s legal and company secretarial functions, he is also responsible for the data protection, quality and compliance functions. Moynagh has built high-functioning in-house teams at both Sysnet and UDG; established UDG’s first external legal panel including the introduction of measurable and comparable KPIs, preferred fees and benefits by practice area and jurisdiction; and is introducing a workload tracker allowing the team to track the volume of work coming through the team. For example, this may be done by type, geography or business unit, and provides actionable data back to the business such as trends, usage by business unit and interaction by client. Apart from the above changes, an important change for UDG was the centralisation of the team and re-branding it as a group function. Moynagh highlights that this ‘has allowed us to better serve the entire group, ensure a varied mix of work and initiate projects such as establishment of the group’s first external legal panel and the introduction of measurable KPIs’. UDG is an acquisitive group, and during the last three years it has seen the acquisition of 10 businesses across the US and Europe, broadening the group’s offerings and accelerating its move into more strategic and higher margin offerings for the benefit of its clients. It has also seen the disposal of the last of its legacy supply chain businesses, closing a chapter on the group’s 70 year history.