France Teams 2017
| Sanofi
Sanofi
Led by well-known general counsel Karen Linehan, the Sanofi legal team operates in the highly regulated healthcare and pharmaceuticals industry, and maintains an immense amount of legal talent in support of its activities worth over €33bn in revenue. Indeed, the legal team in France alone consists of 126 individuals, while the global total is around 430, making it one of the largest in-house legal functions worldwide. Claire Terrazas, vice president of corporate legal affairs, was keen to point out that the team is expertly led, and Linehan has demonstrated ‘great legal and business integrity’ during her over 20 year tenure at the business. The team favours ‘internal mobility in [its] lawyers’, which drives ‘constant development of the legal team’, and it is always keen to find new and effective methods for organising the team. One example of this is the presence of Louis Pachebat, chief operating officer legal and compliance, within the team. Pachebat is tasked with overseeing non-legal matters and he has a broad remit, as he explains: ‘I would describe myself as a change agent with four main objectives. These are to conduct transformational initiatives, conduct worldwide and groupwide projects, implement project roadmaps and manage external law firms’, thus freeing up other members of the team to pursue solely legal goals. Another instance of innovation is its establishment of ‘an in-house legal academy’ within Sanofi to train its lawyers, which highlights how importantly the company regards its in-house legal team. Given the size and scope of the company’s activities, some of the projects that the in-house legal team at Sanofi works on are often vast in scale. As an example of this, Terrazas points to the ‘huge M&A transaction… where we swapped our animal health business Merial, worth around €11bn, with Boehringer-Ingelheim’s consumer health business CHC, valued at around €6bn’. Terrazas is clear that ‘great communication’ is a key ingredient in the team’s success, and makes the point that adhering to the strictest ethical standards are of paramount importance going forward. ‘Regulations are becoming ever more comprehensive’, she says, ‘especially for such a heavily regulated industry. Ethics cannot be removed from lawyers as these go hand in hand, and all members of the department need to take care around this’.
