About

While he has worked in other industry sectors (principally aeronautics, at Embraer) and also spent time in private practice (at intellectual property specialists, Gusmão & Labrunie), Paulo Fonseca has primarily developed his career in the pharmaceutical sector where he has over 15 years’ experience. Beginning his career as legal director at Merck Sharp & Dohme, and having also spent time at Abbott Laboratories, Syngenta Crop Protection and Syngenta Seeds, he is currently legal manager and associate general counsel for Brazil and Latin America at Amgen. Responsible for establishing the company’s in-house legal department, he has sought, ‘from the beginning’ to impart ‘a strategic orientation to add value to the different businesses in full alignment with international legal guidelines’, ensuring that ‘any legal activity has the same objectives as the business, but with the necessary independence’. Insiders identify him as ‘a real specialist’ and ‘the best expert in medicine registration and the local FDA regulations’, someone who is genuinely ‘focused on the highly regulated pharmaceutical market here’ (‘they’re really complex regulations that very few really understand!’). One partner who undertook a transaction with him notes, frankly, ‘his knowledge of the sector far outstrips ours’, adding that ‘it is hugely complex to register a new product or open a new company in this sector and he has this information and know how; he can guide corporate lawyers who know the process in other sectors through it in this one’. Thriving on ‘proximity to the decision making circle and the ability to influence it’, Fonseca nevertheless notes that ‘on many occasions’ the greatest challenge is simply ‘to be heard’.