About

Andreas Neumann has been receiving praise from all sides for his ‘successful set-up of a worldwide, integrated team of lawyers’, which, according to observers, has mastered ‘incredibly complex and commercially vital challenges’. Since 2011 Neumann has been Boehringer Ingelheim’s group general counsel and in charge of legal and compliance worldwide. He brings to the table a wide range of in-house experience, recently working as general counsel at GE Healthcare EMEA. This tremendous experience is one of the reasons for his success in a company with a turnover of €14.6bn and 45,000 employees globally. As Germany’s biggest pharmaceutical company, Boehringer Ingelheim operates in over 100 countries and has lawyers in Europe, the US and Asia. Neumann heads a team of 250, more than half of which are lawyers, while he can rely on his global leadership team consisting of 13 direct reports. The mere structuring of such a department is in itself a challenge, which Neumann has met by, among other measures, globally introducing a Business Partnering Competency Model which ensures that ‘employees can gain the right skills not only in terms of technical knowledge but also regarding leadership skills’. But Neumann is always looking ahead – he has developed the ‘Legal Roadmap 2025’. ‘It deals with the question what legal will look like at Boehringer Ingelheim in 2025’. All of this is of course being handled next to the day to day business, most recently large scale product liability lawsuits in the US. Overall Neumann perceives as the biggest challenge for any corporate counsel to ‘successfully operate within the sometimes tensed field of business partner and company guardian’.