What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

At AstraZeneca, the overarching aim of the legal function is to continuously enable decisive and defensible business execution amid uncertainty by setting priorities, clarifying actions, and balancing competing interests across multiple stakeholders.

One of my biggest priorities is safeguarding and enforcing the intellectual property that protects AstraZeneca’s medicines, in order to preserve patient access and enterprise value. With reference to the IP Protection Strategy in the markets under my responsibility, I typically adopt a layered, lifecycle approach that integrates patents, regulatory data exclusivities, and trade secrets with AstraZeneca’s globally coordinated regulatory and commercial functions. Consequently, we translate global strategies to the local market level, anchoring exclusivity in strong composition-of-matter claims, complemented by method-of-use, formulation, process, and device/combination-product patents. I am also constantly liaising with the global legal and IP teams to maintain litigation and enforcement readiness through country-by-country dossiers and coordinated strategies, underpinned by compliant communications and robust governance.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?  

Managing legal aspects during periods of instability requires proactive risk identification, disciplined governance, and agile decision-making to protect operations and enable business continuity. The typical legal approach is to execute a structured risk triage across contracts, regulatory obligations, supply chains, workforce, data, and liquidity, embedding clear escalation pathways and prompt management reporting.

Our organisation’s resilience is supported through various legal instruments, such as template packages and delegated authorities, which accelerate decisions without sacrificing compliance, while outcomes are further strengthened through scenario planning, cross-functional collaboration, and transparent stakeholder communications, all backed by adequate supporting documentation.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of? 

In-house lawyers operate amid accelerating regulatory, technological, and geopolitical shifts that materially affect corporate risk and strategy. From my perspective, the key focus areas and trends to be closely monitored include AI governance, which is moving towards comprehensive frameworks emphasising safety, transparency, bias mitigation, and accountability, with sector-specific obligations and heightened product liability exposure; data privacy, which remains fragmented across jurisdictions, tightening consent requirements, data subjects’ protections, and cross-border transfer controls; cybersecurity legal frameworks, with compressed incident reporting timelines and expanded management requirements; antitrust enforcement, scrutinising mergers and acquisitions, vertical conduct, and labour-market restraints; ESG and supply-chain due diligence regimes, which intensify disclosure burdens and greenwashing risk while increasing assurance expectations; sanctions and export controls, which demand dynamic screening, contract agility, and real-time horizon scanning; IP practice, facing stricter enablement and obviousness standards and expanded use of post-grant proceedings; employment law, evolving in response to remote work, pay transparency, and the use of AI in HR; and litigation, with a focus on class actions in privacy, consumer, and securities matters.  

What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?  

Our organisation typically relies on a mix of strategic, risk, capability, and cost considerations when choosing between in-house management of legal matters and retaining external law firms. The optimal approach blends both, leveraging in-house teams for business-as-usual and operational advice while using external legal specialists for high-stakes, novel, or resource-intensive matters. Our decisions are based on a clear assessment of legal complexity, risk profile, internal capacity and expertise, cost-effectiveness, and the need for independent or privileged legal advice.

As a general principle, we adopt a practical approach using a hybrid model, where in-house lawyers enable faster, business-aligned decisions for day-to-day needs, while targeted external legal specialists are engaged for complex and transformational transactions, cross-border issues, or strategic disputes.

We use business-oriented criteria to evaluate performance in handling legal matters, with a focus on outcomes (quality, timeliness, operational excellence, continuous improvement), cost and value, strategic alignment, risk mitigation, and stakeholder satisfaction.