About

After training with A&L Goodbody and qualifying with them in 2010, Bryan O’Boyle took up seats in the corporate department working on domestic and international clients. He initially joined ICON as a legal associate, after a career break in Latin America and a stint doing corporate litigation in Dublin, and has since worked his way through the ranks of the rapidly growing pharmaceutical company. He now leads a team of six lawyers. He identifies that he, ‘wanted to work in a company that was making a difference and saw an open role ICON in 2013 who’s mission was to help clients accelerate the development of drugs and devices that save lives and improve quality of life and with a global remit working with pharma, biotech and medical device clients from a Dublin headquarters’. His team reports to ICONs chief administration officer and general counsel, Diarmaid Cunningham. Diarmaid who’s expanded remit as CAO, has according to O’Boyle, positioned him to take on a broader leadership role within the overall legal team. These include serving as general counsel for ICON Commercialisation & Outcomes Research (ICO) and ICON Laboratory Services (ICON Labs) service lines. The ICO service line is a global leader for real world evidence, post approval research, language services, consultancy services supporting clinical outcomes assessments, pricing and market access and scientific communications and also includes the medical device and diagnostic research unit which is a growing and fascinating industry. The ICON Labs service line have locations in key global regions including Ireland, US, Singapore and China providing a range of central laboratory and bioanalytical and services to meet the research and development challenges of the pharma, biotech and medical device industries. The team’s 2019 acquisition of Molecular MD has extended the company’s molecular diagnostic offering. O’Boyle’s team is legal business partner for both service lines as well as supporting the sales teams in winning new business and contract negotiations including commercial and partnership agreements with top global pharma, biotech and device and diagnostic clients. It also provides legal oversight of ICO’s study start-up and site contracting team since 2017 supporting the negotiation of commercial contracts with healthcare institutions and investigators for the conduct of late phase clinical, non-interventional and observational, and medical device and diagnostic trials. It also leads on insurance, litigation and IP matters across ICON’s four main revenue generating business units. The ICON legal team has done an excellent job at selling their value to our stakeholders in getting us involved in a proactive manner. O’Boyle highlights that, ‘his team works very closely with key operational contacts at [its] clients and not just their legal professionals. With that in mind, building these contacts and normalising the relationship with key stakeholders involved is imperative and positions us to be a proactive legal business-partnering model rather than reactive escalations. Working in this model with key stakeholders highlights the true value that legal professionals can bring to the table and it has helped ICONs business as a result’.