| Shire
Shire
General counsel, company secretary | Diageo
Chief counsel | Financial Services Compensation Scheme
Team size: 15 Major legal advisers: Addleshaw Goddard, Bevan Brittan, Burges Salmon, Burness Paull, Clifford Chance, Dentons and Eversheds Sutherland What are the most important transactions, litigations, or other major...
Vice president and general counsel | Acklands-Grainger
Kevin Derbyshire, vice president and general counsel at industrial supply company Acklands-Grainger, is responsible for all legal matters and, as of October, 2013, the company’s corporate global real estate and...
| Shire
Shire’s Eurasia Middle East and Africa legal function is headquartered in Dubai, with team members dotted around Russia, India, Turkey and South Africa. Head counsel Narguiz Birk-Petersen explains that the...
| Shire
Originating from the UK, registered in Jersey, headquartered in Ireland and with an operational base in the US, Shire Pharmaceuticals is a truly global pharmaceutical business whose products include well-known...
| Shire Pharmaceuticals
With a requirement to keep pace with a changing regulatory regime across the wide remit of Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, John Yoo is senior counsel at Shire...
Bill Mordan and the inhouse legal team at FTSE 100 pharmaceutical company Shire have – typically for the industry – been mainly occupied with patent litigation during 2017, but have...
Shire is a major international biopharmaceutical company with a presence across much of the world. This, and the highly regulated nature of the market sector the company operates in, means that highly competent in-house counsel are a necessity for the business. Mauricio Pinheiro is head of the nine-person, Brazil-headquartered Latin American legal team, which has responsibility for all countries in Latin America including the major markets of Argentina and Mexico. Pinheiro goes into the highly varied workload that the team deals with in supporting the diverse business goals inherent in this broad brief. ‘In Brazil and Colombia we have cases open against government entities’, he explains, ‘while in Mexico we have a very complex process for incorporating a new drug [that is] ongoing. Throughout all this, legal has been playing an important role in supporting business, dealing with new regulations for incorporating new drugs and coordinating with business teams on price. This provides a lot of welcome challenge for us’. Carolina Martins, the Brazil legal department’s head, is another example of the individual talent present within the team. She had a significant role in ‘the legal entity integration of Shire and Baxalta, as well as a partnership with the Brazilian government involving the tech transfer of an important Shire product’, according to Pinheiro. He sums up the team’s overall objectives as such: ‘Finding the right balance of what we can achieve with the company, while making sure the company is not exposed to risk is the main goal that we have every day’. The successful completion of these objectives means the Shire legal team in Latin America stands apart from most other legal teams in its industry.
