In 12 closed in-house searches in Bologna over 36 months, our mandate telemetry shows 8 offers went to lawyers already sitting as in-house counsel on CMO, manufacturing, or logistics paper. Contract-manufacturing literacy is the signature at this seniority. Day to day the seat sits with Procurement, Supply Chain, Quality, and Regulatory: templates and negotiation for direct procurement, manufacturing (CMO and CDMO), supply, logistics and distribution; third-party risk; customs and competition hygiene; quality claims and delivery failures; and manufacturing-scope due diligence on buys and sell-downs. Alfasigma's 30 June 2026 brief also named ESG and CSRD supply-chain due diligence and M&A support from a supply and manufacturing perspective, at eight to ten years, reporting into Corporate Legal Affairs.
The CV that looks right and is wrong is the eight-to-ten-year life-sciences commercial counsel who has never opened a tech-transfer file, the competition associate who has never sat in a plant quality-claim, or the packaging-equipment counsel who knows serialization lines but not API or sterile CMO paper. Adjacent seats that do convert: in-house counsel already doing CMO or CDMO, procurement, manufacturing, logistics or distribution agreements; manufacturing and tech-ops legal; and private-practice commercial, competition, trade, or ESG due-diligence lawyers who can evidence plant-level manufacturing contracts. A chief legal officer at a listed packaging-equipment manufacturer said the seat needed someone who had already lived a sterile-fill tech transfer. Sartori's Bologna mandate telemetry records a 30 percent counter-offer incidence on this line. Our typical retained clocks run 8 to 16 weeks.
