Setting up an in-house legal function at Novo Nordisk UK & Ireland

Background

Before founding LS Law, Wendy Lloyd-Goodwin joined Novo Nordisk as the first in-house lawyer for the UK & Ireland affiliate — tasked with building the legal function from scratch. Novo Nordisk's UK & Ireland affiliate had no in-house legal function. Legal demand was being absorbed by external counsel and by the business teams themselves, which is workable up to a point but does not scale — particularly in pharma, where day-to-day commercial activity sits inside a tightly regulated framework (ABPI Code, transparency obligations, HCP engagement rules) and small contracting choices can carry real compliance consequences.

The brief was to set the function up properly from day one: not just to start signing contracts, but to build the underlying processes, templates and training that would let the business operate compliantly and confidently without escalating every question to legal.

The LS Law Approach

Three streams, in parallel: process, templates, training. Rather than working sequentially, the three streams were built and stood up in parallel so the business had a working in-house function from early on rather than waiting twelve months for the 'finished' version.

ABPI-compliant processes and procedures. We designed and embedded the processes the business actually used day to day — HCP engagement workflows, materials approval routes, transparency reporting prep, escalation rules — aligned with the ABPI Code and Novo Nordisk's global standards.

Contract template stack and approval workflow. We built the full template suite (NDAs, MSAs, SOWs, distribution, services, sponsorship, HCP engagement contracts) with standard positions, fallback positions and a clear structured review-and-approval workflow — so a routine contract did not become a bespoke negotiation every time.

'When and how to use legal' training. A training programme for the business teams covering self-serve contracting on the templates, when a matter must come to legal, what good information looks like when it does, and how the approval routes work — turning the legal function from a bottleneck into a leveraged service.

The Outcome

By the end of the engagement, the affiliate had a fully operational in-house legal function: ABPI-aligned processes the business knew how to use, a working contract template stack with clear approval routes, and a trained business population that knew when and how to bring matters to legal. External counsel use dropped to genuine specialist work rather than business-as-usual contracting.

The blueprint developed at Novo Nordisk — process, templates and training in parallel — is the same approach LS Law now uses when standing up in-house legal functions for clients.

From no in-house lawyer to a working, ABPI-aligned legal function the business adopted.