Team size: 38

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most?

In-house legal teams already enjoy cloud solutions, file-sharing platforms, and powerful legal research engines. That said, these are only preludes to the digital transformation arriving soon to the traditionally low-tech legal universe. One could see three areas reshaped by technological advancements – how legal teams work, who they recruit and how internal clients experience legal services.

In the front line of digitalisation there’s process and documents’ automation, plug-and-play template clauses, repetitive administrative tasks, contract management and approval workflows which can be automated by the marvels of AI, data analytics and computing power. Going forward legal departments should attract talents with digital skillsets and mindset, potentially even recruiting non-lawyers, such as IT engineers and specialists.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

They need to learn the business and learn how to “speak” business. They should be able to convey legal advice but must first make it comprehensive and measurable for internal clients. Understanding the numbers, aligning legal tactics with business strategy and quantifying risk in any legal assessment should be techniques steadily used.

Timely involvement of legal and capitalising on its cross-functional perspective, solidifies relationships between in-house counsel and the business. Lastly an investment into collaboration mechanics is necessary. Regular 1:1 meeting, standardised fast-track solutions and progress trackers have proven to be good conductors of legal advice, much appreciated by the business.

What are the most significant cases or projects you have been involved in recently?

We have been actively involved in the integration of two legacy organisations into one market leader. The game changing combination of Mylan and Upjohn (a Pfizer division), formed Viatris, a new kind of healthcare company. Executing on the launch of Viatris was a high value and complex project, with legal work spanning merger legalities and synergies, to regulatory formalities and rebranding activities.

We also consolidated and optimised Viatris’ exporting business in Cyprus which was a multidisciplinary cross-border project, that required extensive legal work on its commercial, financial and supply chain aspects, in parallel to contracting high value distributorships.

The team has also contributed to an initiative driven by Viatris’ European legal team, whereby template agreements for interacting with the healthcare community have been rethought, unconventionally designed, digitalised, and integrated to an end-to-end online application.