LSHC Horizons Brochure 2024 - Flipbook - Page 74
Hogan Lovells | 2024 Life Sciences and Health Care Horizons | Cross-jurisdictional
Organizational means to efficiently handle social media, apps,
and website projects in the legal department
Legal departments in pharmaceutical or
medical device companies are often confronted
with new media projects of their internal
clients. Such projects may be the establishing
of a social media platform or a new website,
introducing apps for health care professionals
(HCPs) or patients as well as use of influencers.
Usually, several departments within a company
are involved in such projects, since they
touch upon various aspects like promotional
compliance, HCP compliance, public relations,
IT, privacy, pharmacovigilance – and legal.
Often, the project management by the
responsible department is poor or non-existing
and such projects need to be handled under
time pressure. In an effort to get a project
legally right, a legal department often finds
itself being pushed into the undesired role
of the project lead, collecting information
required, checking involvement of various
stakeholders concerned, etc. – in order to grant
approval for a project to go live.
However, there are means to handle
these situations. The key solutions are
organizational and procedural means which
the legal department would implement. The
overarching aim would be to provide the key
stakeholders with means to be able to take their
responsibilities. Hereby the legal department
would achieve not being pushed into the
driver’s seat.
Dr. Jörg Schickert
Partner
Munich
• Once the request to approve a new project
comes in, the legal team should have a
questionnaire which is handed over to the
project lead. Therein, the questions on the
objectives of the project, target groups, the
timelines and other relevant aspects would
need to be clarified; the project would need
to be clearly described taking all relevant
aspects into account. The project lead would
need to be defined.
• Based on that questionnaire, initial advice by
the legal department could be provided.
• The questionnaire would then be
supplemented by a checklist which the
project lead would need to process.
– The checklist would force the project lead
to consider which departments in the
company need to be involved and whether
this has already happened.
– Further, the checklist would request
the project lead to tick-box of aspects
including: terms of use, privacy,
cybersecurity, pharmacovigilance, thirdparty-vendor due diligence, third party
content and copyrights, trademark use,
confidentiality of company information,
HCP, and promotional compliance,
handling inappropriate content, etc.
• Only once the checklist is properly processed
would the legal department get more closely
involved in legally assessing the project and
eventually approving the project.
Dr. Benjamin Goehl
Senior Associate
Munich
74
