About

Market-leading contract research organisation ICON operates across the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries. A well-known figure in Irish legal circles, sources particularly highlight Diarmaid Cunningham’s role in developing a unified and sophisticated global function. ‘We are constantly looking to progress and develop as the CRO partner of choice in drug development’, Cunningham says. ‘Our partner of choice vision and the complex nature of our industry means that ICON Legal must provide business-focused and proactive solutions and advice to our internal customers’. Cunningham became ICON’s general counsel and company in 2009, after practising at *[A&L Goodbody 10011] for over a decade. At the root of the team’s success, in Cunningham’s view, is the quality of the people recruited during the course of its growth. ‘The ICON legal team is made up of talented and dynamic lawyers who operate to blue-chip standards in our dynamic and challenging industry’. The now 28-strong function is split across Dublin, the US, Holland, Argentina and China. In response to its growing US footprint, Cunningham was seconded over to Pennsylvania, ICON’s US base in 2013, in order to build his knowledge of the US business, and is set to return to Ireland in 2017. His role as general counsel, he says, has been largely unchanged by the move: ‘I am doing the same job in a different location’.