Login
Chameleon shows his true colours
UNLIKE MOST lawyers entering a big commercial firm, Dan Devine sought to get out as quickly as possible. He moved over to an in-house role, then to business development, and finally became CEO…
Angela Priestley
UNLIKE MOST lawyers entering a big commercial firm, Dan Devine sought to get out as quickly as possible. He moved over to an in-house role, then to business development, and finally became CEO of a leading pharmaceutical company.
Fresh out of law school, Devine took on what he then considered an “exciting opportunity” to join Dewey Valentine, a big Wall Street firm. However, devoid of interest in making partner and realising he could not identify with his work, he decided to join a pharmaceutical company.
“I wasn’t targeting an industry, I just wanted to be in-house,” he said. “I felt that I’d be better working for a single company and identifying myself with it.”
Later, he moved on to Warner-Lambert, a pharmaceutical company at that time on the brink of launching some significant products. Although he was a representative on business development deals, Devine said he often found himself sitting in meetings with cross-functional teams of marketers, sales and manufacturing teams.
“I found that lawyers never really got to run the meeting,” he said. “We were purely a service and that kind of got to me after a while.
“I said: ‘I’d like to move over into the business side’ and they said: ‘You can’t do that.’ I asked why not and they said: ‘Because you’re a lawyer and lawyers can’t run businesses!”
It was, however, a three-to-four-year process before he could work his way out of the law side of the organisation and into the business.
“People didn’t see it as a good thing because I was a lawyer,” he said. “But when I went over to the business side and realised I liked it, I never went back.”
After structuring a deal with Pfizer, Devine made contacts within the New York city-based business. When Warner-Lambert was bought out by Pfizer, his new employers offered him the position of director, managing Pfizer’s international business development group.
Two years later, Devine started his own biotech company — Acceptys Inc — which was later acquired alongside a German Company to form Patrys Limited.
Now, as CEO of Patrys, Devine still does not have a background in medicine, but he’s deeply passionate about the potential of the company’s drugs, which offer promising treatments for a number of different diseases.
