Team size: Five

Can you tell us a little about your significant accomplishments over the last few years, as a team or by yourself?

Following BD’s acquisition of CR Bard in late 2017, I took on leadership of legal support for BD’s newly-formed Medication Delivery Solutions business, which combined two legacy BD and Bard businesses in the areas of medication preparation and administration, venous access and catheter maintenance and was BD’s largest business unit at approximately $4 billion in annual revenue. In this role, my team and I helped lead the integration of this new business unit, with a particular focus on the harmonisation of the rules and procedures for the review and approval of advertising and promotional materials and the implementation of a new B2B contracting approach for direct sales to the pharmaceutical industry.

In parallel, I also led legal support for BD’s Pharmaceutical Systems business, which supplies the pharmaceutical industry with prefillable syringes and self-administration systems, with a focus on implementing numerous strategic partnerships to support BD’s innovation and new product development programs.

From mid-2019 through the end of 2021, I led the design, implementation and operations of a contracting center of excellence for all BD businesses in the EMEA region. The new COE team – based in Poland – joined BD in early March 2020, meaning that I had to create a virtual training and onboarding program on the fly, as Covid-19 travel restrictions were announced just a few days before they were scheduled to travel to France for onboarding. Despite these challenges, the team was quickly integrated into BD, and thanks to their fantastic engagement and a bottom-up approach to designing our contracting processes, the COE was fully operational well ahead of schedule in early 2021 and has been broadly viewed as a great success within the company.

What do you predict will be the biggest change to the legal market in France, in the next few years?

I foresee two main trends. I believe we will continue to see a shift to AI-assisted and template-based automation of routine legal tasks as companies seek to improve cost efficiency for basic legal services, but as a corollary, I think that the role of legal counsel – and in particular in-house counsel – as true business advisors, and not just legal experts, will take on increasing importance as companies seek to navigate an ever-more-complex legal, business and regulatory environment.