About

As the general counsel at Iovate Health Sciences International Roch Vaillancourt oversees 16 professionals handling compliance, regulatory, safety assurance and corporate affairs. Vaillancourt has spent large parts of his career in business and is known for his commercial acumen. After his last solo mandate in 2006 Vaillancourt decided to go back to in-house as senior counsel. Within five months he was promoted to assistant general counsel and director of legal and eventually took over as general counsel in 2012. He continued the work he had started during his tenure as director of the legal department, to maximise in-house efficiency. Vaillancourt facilitated that by replacing generalist lawyers with specialists in their respective fields. He internalised the Global Trademark Portfolio Management, while optimising patent prosecution with external vendors. An eDiscovery platform was also implemented, and an early case assessment approach to litigation management was adopted minimising costs and disruption to the business. Vailancourt says that even though he is proud of his performance in those high-stake negotiations he doesn’t consider it his best achievement: ‘I personally believe my greatest achievement to date is having built such an extremely talented, lean, versatile and efficient legal team. I am a business enable rather than a show stopper. It’s easy to lower risk, by saying “no” to everything, but that’s a deadly proposition for a business and a short lived career for a GC. Therefore, my value add to the business lies in my ability to lead a team that can keep the playing field as clean as possible, for the business to play out its game and win. When done well, the business doesn’t even think about how clean it is or who cleaned it, they then just focus on winning’.