Team size: 105

Key team members: Diarmaid Cunningham (Chief administration officer and general counsel) Simon Hollywood, Bryan O’Boyle, Jennifer Everitt, Ciara Farrell, Barry Leyden and Dominic Burke

What are the most significant cases and transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

In 2021, ICON acquired PRA Health Sciences, creating the world’s leading clinical research organisation with over 41,000 employees across 98 locations in 46 countries. Our mission is to improve patient’s lives by utilising innovative solutions to accelerate the development of drugs and devices. The ICON legal team supports that mission by delivering legal solutions to our internal and external stakeholders. In 2022, this resulted in over 25,000 patients enrolled on our projects across 1491 studies. This work contributed to 13 drug approvals.

Our legal business partnering teams also led negotiations on the renewal and implementation of key agreements with the world’s largest pharma companies and our other customers to support our revenue growth to $7.7bn.

Our data protection team was awarded ISO27701 Certification – the world’s most recognised privacy information management standard – demonstrating the integrity and credibility our global data protection programme.

Finally, we established a global centre of excellence for employment law and litigation.

What has been the number one challenge that has impacted you over the past year?

Due to our acquisition of PRA Health Sciences, we had to integrate and align two comparably sized legal teams. This was a challenge because at the same time, our team had to continue providing quality services to internal and external customers. These tasks were successfully achieved thanks to the talent and drive of the ICON legal team.

Has the increasing consciousness of climate change and sustainability affected your company and the team’s priorities, and if so, how?

We are deeply committed to addressing Environment, Social and Governance issues, including climate change and sustainability.

Our ESG program office sits in ICON Legal, and reports to me, providing operational oversight for ESG activity across ICON and managing ESG reporting. Supported by our ESG Committee – which regularly executes, reviews and communicates updates on ESG-related activity – this team delivers centralised reporting and tracking of ESG initiatives.

ICON’s leadership team remains engaged in providing oversight for ESG strategy and initiatives with our ESG strategies embedded across the organisation. I regularly update the board’s nominating, sustainability and governance committee on our ESG program and initiatives.

Our ESG program was awarded a silver medal from EcoVadis, achieving an overall score improvement of 40% from 2020 through 2022 and placing ICON in the top quartile of companies participating in its program worldwide.

In January 2023, we launched ICON Cares – a company-wide initiative that demonstrates our ongoing commitment to ESG and monitors progress across our strategies and goals. ICON Cares is a holistic approach which incorporates ESG, diversity, inclusion and belonging, and CSR initiatives into one program. We aim to engage our stakeholders and identify further opportunities for advancements in areas like diversity, inclusion and belonging where we can positively impact our people, partners, communities, and patients.