After spending more than a decade in private practice Leonor Pissarra made her move in-house in September 2011 to join Novartis as legal officer and country compliance head. In the subsequent years, her team has evolved from a typical service provider to a true business partner that, according to Pissarra, ‘acts and supports the teams and projects from the very beginning and has actively contributed to the good results achieved by the company in the last few years’.

She explains further: ‘each business unit or department has a dedicated lawyer, expert in the pharmaceutical field who, together with other business partners in different functions, is a core member of each team. Our next challenge in this journey is for each one of us, as lawyers, to also become a businessperson’. Besides contributing to the evolution of her team’s role in the company, Pissarra has looked inwards, searching for ways to streamline existing corporate processes.

This has included revamping the unit’s contracts approvals flow, which enabled the team to deliver more value through saving time and resources. ‘While it seems something simple, it has had a huge impact in the organisation, as we execute hundreds of contracts on a yearly basis,’ Pissarra says. ‘We will continue to drive this effort in simplification and efficiency, specifically in low value and high volume contracts, as we believe it to be key for future success’. Under Pissarra’s leadership Novartis’ legal team has produced exceptional results in shielding the business by, for instance, protecting the intellectual property of all Novartis products, including the so-called “blockbusters”, which are close to the expiry date of their patents, thus leading to the full maximisation of the company’s assets.

‘This is particularly remarkable as Portugal has a unique legal system, imposing arbitration to enforce IP rights related to medicines,’ Pissarra states. ‘Given the tight deadlines to initiate this process (30 days), daily monitoring is required, as failure to react in time would mean losing the chance to enforce our IP rights’. Among a plethora of projects completed over her six-year career at Novartis, Pissarra takes particular pride in her contribution to the internal “Novartis Way” campaign. This project was designed to back Novartis’ aspiration to be the world’s most respected and successful healthcare company, while earning and maintaining the trust and support of stakeholders. According to Pissarra the results of the project were ‘outstanding’ as today ‘there is a culture of integrity, compliance and “speaking up” embedded in the organisation – one of its cornerstones’.