What impact did the pandemic have on the Pharmaceutical and Medical Technology Industries in Switzerland?

It forced healthcare companies to operate differently. Like all companies in person meetings with colleagues became virtual, as did those with healthcare providers, who had even less time to engage with pharmaceutical representatives. And it became mission-critical to speed things up in an industry that was used to take for R&D. What used to be done in weeks now gets done in days or hours. Companies invested in building digital capabilities to enable virtual connectivity with healthcare providers and patients. Legal departments alike invested time in rethinking the way of working to become faster, more transparent and consistent in how they responded to day-to-day issues. Also, the approach to extraordinary legal activities became more digitally focused. Legal departments leverage data and data analytics in an unprecedented way. The pandemic also had an impact on how players in the healthcare sector collaborate – the race to finding vaccines or therapies to treating the novel corona virus redefined interaction amongst competitors or with academia and healthcare agencies.

What “legal tech” products do you currently utilise, and do you foresee implementing more of these in the near future?

The legal professionals at Novartis are using legal tech and general tech that is utilised by other functions as well. This ensures that legal professionals can collaborate seamlessly with their business partners. For example, the legal team supporting the procurement function is utilising the procurement lifecycle management tool to provision contract templates, support negotiations or contribute to obligation management. Legal specific tools or legal tech has been deployed in areas like litigation, eDiscovery and IP asset management where the legal department is the unique user of a technology category. These tools have been introduced more than a decade ago and over the last two years we rejuvenated this portfolio through major upgrades or technology changes. In 2018 we kicked-off an initiative to harmonise, simplify and where possible automate legal activities that support the “the normal cause of business”. This includes contracting, data privacy activities, IP, and corporate housekeeping. This initiative targets to free-up legal professionals from repetitive activities like contract drafting or negotiation of standard agreements. Instead we want our legal professionals to have time to analyse a group of activities or transactions to determine trends and outlier transactions and respond to those in a more systemic manner. Technology, contract and process automation software, plays an important role to support this initiative and has been broadly implemented at Novartis. In parallel to the harmonisation, simplification, and automation initiative we have been testing data analytics technologies aiming to provide legal professionals with intelligence and data to support their activities.