Case Study - A Global Pharmaceutical Company

The Client

A global pharmaceutical company

The Challenge

Our client had a long history of using temporary employees to support their clinical contracts department and consistently had four or five interim staff members of varying experience levels supporting their more seasoned and permanent clinical contract managers at any given time. Due to instabilities within the organization in 2011, the company lost much of their permanent clinical contract staff to turnover and found their interim employees were

not experienced enough in the clinical space to keep up with the workload. Although they had an established agency that provided temporary employees, the manager of the clinical group requested assistance with a more specialized recruiting approach in hopes of: 1) identifying candidates with strong clinical experience as well as strong legal and contracts experience and 2) hiring an experienced candidate with niche experience on a long-term (9–12 months or more) basis to help manage the workload while being sensitive to the many changes the company was experiencing at that time.

The Solution

After collaborating with the client to create a profile of the attorney or contracts manager who would best serve the group’s needs, our Interim Legal Talent team worked with our networks to identify, vet and present seasoned professionals with strong backgrounds in negotiating and drafting contracts as well as substantial experience working with clinical trial agreements. 

The Results

Over the course of the next year, we successfully placed four candidates within the clinical contracts group. These candidates all had extensive experience with both contracts and the clinical industry and were able to add significant value to the contracts and legal team over a one- to two-year timeframe. By identifying more specialized candidates, our client was able to: 1) continue to manage the demands of various deadlines and the many moving parts of a clinical trial as an effective manager; 2) stay within the budget restraints; and 3) allow for internal managers to make a case for increased and permanent head count for future budgets.