About

Team size: Four

Major legal adviser: Addleshaw Goddard

‘Thermo Fisher Scientific is one of the biggest and most complicated companies you’ve never heard of,’ says its regional senior corporate counsel, UK and Ireland, Lucie Grant. ‘We buy companies like people buy chewing gum. We either make or sell anything you need to do science within any industry, from the cutting edge down to ibuprofen gel caps.’

Revenue at the US-based life sciences company exceeds $24bn, with more than 70,000 employees globally. Grant’s UK and Ireland legal team of just three lawyers has responsibility for $3.6bn of business, covering up to 29 different companies in the group. She also deals with up to 11,500 distributors, globally.

Operating in that context with such a small legal function – ‘unless you’re stripped to the bone, you’re fat’ – means Grant has placed enormous emphasis on educating the business and implementing a legal automation project. That includes the introduction of a Contract Express-automated tool for the UK businesses, to remove low-value, high-volume workload from her team and enable businesses to conclude non-disclosure agreements, material transfer agreements and other standard documents; embedding the legal team in the training process for the sales teams; and monthly legal Webex training on basic contracting, GDPR and anti-corruption.

‘Eighteen months ago we went through the same training process as the sales team, so we knew what they were getting taught and what contract basis we could teach them,’ she comments. ‘We view our contractual training from the perspective of, “What’s in it for them?” People can still phone in and get advice on an ad hoc basis, but we now form part of the commercial sales training programme, which means my team speaks the same language as our commercial counterparts.’

Grant says her legal team – who are all female and on flexible working arrangements – also began tracking which matters they were spending the most time on, establishing contracting playbooks for certain aspects of low-value work that were dominating their workload. ‘We’ve drilled down into those things we do most regularly – what’s the value of that? Is it best done somewhere else?’ she says. ‘But we’ve then also thought about how we can assist the business without creating more work for them – here’s how you can make that time to contract easier and less painful, without going back with 30 different amendments.’

KPMG UK legal head of services, Nick Roome, says Grant carries considerable internal clout at Thermo Fisher. She’s a statutory director for more than 120 of the company’s UK and Irish subsidiaries, and a member of the EMEA executive leadership team for the Life Sciences Solutions group and legal leadership team. ‘She’s recognised as having significant skills in creating strong business-partnering relationships with senior stakeholder networks and leadership teams, and acting as a trusted adviser, providing advice and strategic input on pan-EMEA restructuring projects,’ he comments.