In house interview: Sean Roberts, GSK Consumer Healthcare

Sean Roberts’ position as general counsel and chief compliance officer of GSK Consumer Healthcare demands that he has myriad perspectives on the business.

GSK Consumer Healthcare, a joint venture between GSK and Novartis, occupies a slightly left-field space. The product of a marriage between two major competitors, the deal completed on 2 March 2015.

Roberts, who had been with GSK for 15 years, was appointed as part of a leadership team to help shape the largest over-the-counter medicine company in the world.

Roberts trained at Simmons & Simmons, moving into the commercial and trade department (now subsumed into the corporate department), on qualification. He had a stint in Abu Dhabi working on defence projects as well as a secondment in-house at tobacco company Gallagher.

“That is when I got a taste for in-house,” he explains. “But I wasn’t actively looking for an in-house role. I was very happy at Simmons.

“But one of our legacy companies here, SmithKline Beecham, was a big client at Simmons and I was offered a job in 1997. It was a no-brainer.”

He explains that he was not deterred by in-house roles being viewed less favourably in the late 1990s. “At that time going in-house was like jumping into the abyss, a career decision where you generally could not go back into practice,” he says.  “But I was so attracted to the international nature of the job. And people I’d spoken to who worked in-house were so energised and fulfilled.

“As soon as I got to GSK it was great, liberating. There were no time sheets, but absolute responsibility and accountability, and a fantastic corporate mission.”

He entered GSK as Middle East counsel, based in London, in 1998 at just five years’ PQE. One year later he was handed responsibility for Africa. Although attracted to working in emerging markets, the merger between SmithKline Beecham and Glaxo Wellcome was on the horizon and Roberts volunteered to be involved in the deal.

His 18 months of supporting international anti-trust filings and helping to stitch the two companies together once the main clearance had gone through landed him a role in the US. 

He spent four years in Philadelphia on technology, licensing, transactions and venture capital work, and returned to the UK with knowledge of the US business and the ability to help bridge the global gap.

Several roles within the company later and Roberts occupies one of only two senior roles in the company, which is ascribed responsibility for both legal and compliance.

“I had never been a compliance officer and I was suddenly in consumer, rather than pharma,” Roberts recalls. “But I now think that any lawyer who has ambitions to be a GC should seek out compliance experience. It’s been incredibly helpful for me.”

Fresh dynamics

The new role brought with it several perspectives. Roberts reports to GSK global general counsel Dan Troy (based in the US) and has dotted lines into Emma Walmsley, CEO of GSK Consumer Healthcare, and chief compliance officer Nick Hirons.

“I’m an employee of GSK but also serve the joint venture [JV],” he muses. “Sometimes the two negotiate and I have to ask myself, ‘Who is my client here?’.”

The dynamic between GSK and Roberts’ part of the business keeps him on his toes.

Another interesting aspect of the JV, which Roberts admits is new to him, is more focused on accountability for the costs of Roberts’ functions as part of JV operating expenses, which is scrutinised by the board. “It is as if I’m part of an external organisation providing a service to GSK,” says Roberts. “Before that it wasn’t looked at with the same lens because I was inside the organisation.”

Despite his team being spread across various far-flung corners of the globe, Roberts is keen on staff development.

“You need to dev­elop your team for outside and inside,” he says. “You want people in your team who are wanted by the outside market. You don’t want people in your team who cannot move elsewhere and are frustrated in their careers. That is not good for anyone.”

Emphatic advice

Roberts insists that GSK does not run a formal panel but instead has preferred advisers.

“I don’t know what people mean when they say they have a formal panel,” he demurs. “How binding is it? I like our hybrid approach.

“We have preferred firms and negotiate those relationships but we don’t have to use them. The beauty of that, for example, is sometimes international firms just don’t have the reach or quality in emerging markets so you can make a choice. You want the best in whatever market you are in, for the company and your shareholders.”

He has one piece of advice for any private practice lawyers advising him and his team.

“I wish law firms were more emphatic in their advice,” he says. “It doesn’t help when we encounter advisers who give an in-house lawyer four complex options when they are heading into a board meeting. It’s useless. It doesn’t help us operate at speed. Get off the fence and say what you would do if you were in my shoes.”