Patricia Barclay (Bonaccord Ecosse Limited)

Bonaccord is a boutique law firm dedicated to providing support to innovative businesses, primarily, but not solely in the life sciences. We operate a low overhead model and endeavour to keep our pricing realistic so that smaller companies are not deterred from using us to their best advantage. We have clients around the world and in addition to trying to meet their legal needs we will also help them with introductions where we can and offer the support that they would expect to get from an experienced in-house lawyer but without the overhead.

We work with academic institutions to help them commercialise their research and to create an environment in which entrepreneurship can flourish through process improvement, academic and practical courses and legal and business support.

We also offer mediation and facilitation services. Businesses of all sizes are increasingly turning to mediation as a faster, cheaper and more satisfactory alternative to litigation but may have overlooked the benefits of facilitation. Using a neutral facilitator to assist in difficult discussions regarding strategic change including mergers or in the case of family businesses, generational change can greatly reduce the potential for a later conflict while maximising the potential benefits of the strategic change.

We offer a variety of courses at both academic and practical levels in business related subjects, and topics related to intellectual property law and the life science industry

Patricia Barclay studied law at Edinburgh and Oxford universities. Having qualified as a solicitor in Scotland she embarked on a career in industry working around the world for a variety of life science/chemical companies. She held senior positions with Pfizer in the UK and US before returning to the UK as General Counsel of Vernalis plc. She then moved to Denmark as General Counsel of the privately held multinational Ferring Group and most recently held the same position at Solvay Pharmaceuticals in Brussels.

She has had responsibility for company secretarial, information services, public affairs and intellectual property management in addition to legal affairs. She has worked on a wide variety of different sorts of issues and contracts all over the world and has hands-on experience of the pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device, cosmetic, animal health, food science and specialty chemical sectors.

She is a popular teacher at both academic and practical levels and offers me a variety of business related courses on subjects such as intellectual property law, negotiation, business management and deal structuring.

Patricia is also a mediator concentrating on business to business disputes and currently serves as chair of the International Bar Association Mediation Techniques Committee