Jorge Muñoz’s 13-year legal career at multinational pharmaceutical giant GSK can be divided into three periods. He started out as a legal counsel partnering with different business units of the company (such as pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, R&D and consumer healthcare), while living and working in Madrid and London. He then moved to London assuming a regional role of assistant general counsel.

Since 2017, Muñoz has been serving as an assistant general counsel covering Southern Europe (SE) and Central Eastern Europe (CEE), leading a team of lawyers and partnering with GSK’s businesses in those regions out of Madrid. This short period has already seen significant operational improvements, with GSK’s Consumer Healthcare business, in particular, recording reduced business risk exposure and decreased legal costs. This has been achieved, in part, thanks to the formulation of new structures and strategies for the legal function. ‘I re-engineered the legal team in CEE and SE, uncovering resources, recruiting twelve in-house lawyers into the team (from Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Spain, France and Italy), reducing total legal costs by 20% and increasing risk management with in-house resources,’ Muñoz shares. Another major organisational improvement developed by Muñoz involves the enhancement of the matrix structure of GSK’s legal function, which has specific regional legal roles partnering each business unit and unique local enterprise legal teams supporting all in-market business units.

‘As a regional legal leader, I have worked on enhancing the legal enterprise model at GSK which aims to provide best in class legal partnership to the different business units at GSK’, Muñoz explains. ‘I led a global after-action review exercise with both business and legal stakeholders, and several areas were identified as key for a successful enterprise legal model. A plan was deployed and GSK legal works currently as a “1Legal organisation”’. In 2018, Muñoz has already made an impression on peers, with his leadership of a team targeting the assessment of competition law risks to GSK Consumer Healthcare operations worldwide and developing a competition law compliance program, covering the main competition law risks and a risk mitigation plan.

In his previous role as assistant general counsel for GSK in London, Muñoz made an immense contribution to a complex three-way transaction, which resulted in the sale of GSK’s oncology business to NVS, the sale of Novartis’ vaccines business to GSK and an incorporation of a joint venture company for GSK’s and NVS’s combined consumer healthcare business. Muñoz explains that such a complex transaction required competition authorities’ clearances all over the world: ‘I was tasked with leading a cross-functional team for submitting to and obtaining “clearances” [from] nineteen different antitrust authorities for the GSK Consumer and Novartis Consumer Joint Venture Company. All clearances were obtained for closing the transaction on time and I got a GSK recognition award from the GSK general counsel’.