About

Robert C. Sexton is a US-trained and US-qualified lawyer, admitted to the bar of New York and the District of Columbia in the 1980’s. He is fluent in six languages, and his global background has seen him play a leading role in Amgen’s international expansion into over 50 markets, through company and asset acquisitions in Brazil, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Greece, Iceland, the Netherlands and South Africa to name a few. He joined the world’s largest biotechnology company in Switzerland, in 2005, at the invitation of the former global general counsel, who had just joined Amgen and had been a former client of Sexton’s in private practice. ‘He asked me specifically if I wanted to “build a world-class legal department for Amgen outside the US”. I said yes and never looked back’, reveals Sexton. His gratitude and love for the opportunity has been evident in the way he has developed and expanded the legal department to form an integral part of the business, as well as being admitted to the international management committee soon after joining. Initially there were four lawyers sitting at the Swiss office, which was then in Luzern, essentially covering the EU countries. In order to build the department Sexton hired steadily to keep up with the growth which has taken the company into almost 100 countries. The department now has 40 lawyers and other legal professionals in 16 countries, and in line with its exponential growth, has seen the international business double in size from US$1.8bn in 2005 to over US$4.5bn in 2017. Despite expanding, Sexton has managed to reduce overall legal spend as a percentage of revenue from the business, while spend on external counsel has significantly dropped in the last 11 years. Sexton has also consciously encouraged and nurtured the lawyers on his team to approach risk from a pragmatic and sensible point of view, ‘As a result the lawyers on my team have a reputation for being quite proactive participants in the business and are often viewed as agents for change at Amgen’ he says. Sexton has additionally encouraged lawyers to participate in government and industry forums that perform advocacy and policy shaping for the industry and they routinely do so, giving Amgen ‘a proper voice in the regulation and future of the industry, which adds real value’. Sexton takes pride in assisting in Amgen’s entry into pharmacogenomics and personalised medicine, when a few years ago he helped run the acquisition of deCODE genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland. ‘I am proud to have assisted in bringing unique capabilities in R&D to the company’, he says.