About

Laurent Pitet, an extremely well respected legal director and compliance officer in his own right, has a highly competent legal team supporting Bayer Healthcare’s company objectives. ‘Each team member has the responsibility of a particular area of business based on a product line’, Pitet explains when discussing the team’s internal structure. ‘In addition, each team member has the responsibility for one particular area of law as well as the experience and expertise to do so. We advise the company as business partners at the earliest point of a project and defend the interests of the company in a proactive and imaginative way. This structure is a key factor in our success’. The Bayer Healthcare legal team’s work has been increasingly concerned with cases related to product liability for pharmaceutical products, as Pitet explained: ‘France is unfortunately becoming a new land of promise for plaintiffs lawyers. This represents a real change in our legal department both in the management of resources and the organisation and profile of the lawyers involved in the defence of company rights. We have been involved in some of the most important and sensitive product liability serial cases in France, in which we are defending company rights in a complex mix of cases pending before the civil and administrative courts and indemnification commissions’. When summing up the team culture, Pitet emphasised the collaborative dimension: ‘The culture implemented within the team could be summarised as “people, passion and performance” but also as “each one participating each one contributing”’.