About

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

The localisation of Roche Products with a local partner and the establishment of a local production site with the latest drug production technologies.

What have been the major external trends that have impacted your team’s work over the past two years (market developments, changing regulatory environment, political events etc)?

Major external trend was the agile transformation within the organisation. All company organisations have been changed and I was one of the sponsors of design groups. During the design and implementation, integration of the agile and regulatory environment was the main challenge for the legal and compliance teams.

What will be the main focus for the company in the next 12 months and how do you intend to assist with this?

Our strategic priorities will be agile transformation journey, de-listing projects, localization, personalized healthcare (PHC) including data. All topics will require close assistance and early involvement.

What techniques do you use to provide commercially-focused and optimal business advice to your company? If so, how do you get these across to more junior lawyers in the team?

Key is to understand business in terms of targets and company strategies.

• Having the “Risk Manager” responsibility within the organization, annually we run interviews with 10% of the employees in order to understand their perspective for risk and opportunities of the affiliate for the upcoming 5 years. We use the interviews as a tool to understand the business. Outcome of the risk & opportunity management process is to define the key priorities of the affiliate and follow up with the key responsibles. Junior lawyers in the team also involve in the whole process so they get closer to the business mindset.
• We schedule dual visits to the physicians and healthcare organizations together with sales field as a part of the onboarding and continue annually. This helps legal& compliance team to understand the needs of the internal and external stakeholders.
• I share to the extent possible, all market insight such as competitive intelligence reports, financial reports, pipeline information with the team so they understand that legal & compliance is more a strategic role rather than an operational role. This source of information help them to support business as a partner and have the helicopter view for going forward.

Does the team use any “legal tech” products and do you find them a helpful management device?

We do not have high litigation burden. Therefore, we are manually preparing the quarterly reporting where the legal tech mostly used for have been done manually.

Instead of a reporting tool, we have initiated a digitalization project where our sales force will get digital signatures of HCPs and HCOs contracts, invitations, consents etc. via their iPads.

After the agile transformation of the affiliate, another need to implement tech solution has arised. We will implement tolls to the control points with AI for internal audit purposes.

FOCUS ON: Leadership

Leaders with Legal & Compliance Backbone;

For many years it has been always considered that Legal role is a reading aid where you upload all the contracts/documents and ask for the track changed and clean version to forward to the customer, supplier etc.

Yet in time, the role has evolved from operational to strategic and support to core of the business. All prudent companies positioned their legal executives in their board not just for their legal background but also aimed to benefit from their business acumen.

In Roche, I can clearly see that, in the progress of time, legal roles have been evolved accordingly.