About

Jesper Bergkvist is the legal director for AstraZeneca’s Nordic and Baltic regions, and is the most senior lawyer in the team taking charge of 10 employees in total. As an Anglo-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical giant, the company operates amidst the context of a marketplace that poses several problems to corporate and legal professionals, as Bergkvist explains pharmaceutical company’s work in an environment that is ‘highly regulated and complicated’. After qualifying and spending approximately five years in the Södra Roslag District Court and three years at the Lindahl law firm in Stockholm, Bergkvist began his in-house legal career in 1998 joining AstraZeneca as a legal counsel and working in ‘global legal roles supporting the corporate and R&D functions as well as the global legal role responsible for sales and marketing matters’. In 2010, he started as legal director responsible for all legal matters in the Nordic and Baltic countries. When asked to recall his most notable career highlights, Bergkvist states he has, in recent years, ‘successfully managed a global legal defence of [the company’s] top brand Symbicort from legal and regulatory attacks by competitors’ which he acknowledges his undertaking of ‘calculated risks’ as well as ‘confidence in my company’s research’. Further displaying his negotiating skills and dedication to corporate social responsibility, Bergkvist ‘successfully managed the negotiations with the 120 Nordic victims of the severe side effects of a drug sold in the late 1950s’. He also ‘had for a number of years the legal responsibility for our global alliance for diabetes with another “big pharma” company’, he states, this alliance made clear the value of having speed and simplicity in decision making in collaborations’. Such instances have fed into his motivation to treat his role as one that requires a true business mind-set; and several internal changes Bergkvist has pioneered including the introduction of ‘electronic contracting [and] electronic agreements/signatures’ which have ‘saved 75% of the time and resources used by the business for contracting’. External factors that influence the business include pressure from governments that Bergkvist states requires ‘work [that is] smarter using less resources to bring new products to the market quicker. In AstraZeneca, we do this by having simplification and entrepreneurship as top values for our work’. The latter values are self-evident from Bergkvist’s role, as he is a keen proponent of maintaining ‘informal daily contacts with president and senior management, which makes it easy for them to quickly ask for my advice on matters that come up’. When asked to provide advice to peers, he encourages all in-house lawyers to think as businesspeople, and suggests they should ‘only spend the company’s time and resources on relevant matters, [as] everything you do should bring you closer to corporate targets’.