Hogan Lovells Adds First Corporate Partner to Growing Boston Outpost
Suzanne Filippi joins Hogan Lovells after stints at TripAdvisor and two Boston-based pharmaceutical companies.
September 16, 2019 at 05:48 PM
4 minute read
Suzanne Filippi of Hogan Lovells (courtesy photo)
Suzanne Filippi, a former in-house legal executive at two Cambridge, Massachusetts-area pharmaceutical companies, is joining Hogan Lovells' 2-year-old Boston office, the firm said Monday.
Filippi will be a partner in the firm's life sciences and health care industry group, which follows her prior roles at Aegerion Pharmaceuticals and Sage Therapeutics, the latter of which she joined and left this year. Her new practice at Hogan Lovells will include complex corporate and M&A transactions for clients who are in the life sciences industry, such as pharmaceutical companies.
Filippi is the first corporate specialist to work out of Hogan Lovells' Boston location, a 41,000-square-foot space the firm is leasing downtown, said Bill Lovett, the office's managing partner.
She's joining an office that is already staffed with an intellectual property team the firm poached from McDermott Will & Emery, as well as former IBM assistant general counsel David Walsh and attorneys from Collora, the litigation boutique Hogan Lovells absorbed to set up shop in Boston two years ago.
"Suzanne is the first and not the last piece of our corporate strategy," Lovett said.
Filippi said she was appreciative of Hogan Lovell's commitment to Boston and the life sciences companies working there, and she touted the firm's global platform and regulatory bench. "I think the existing clients are welcoming that expansion in Boston," she said.
Filippi joined Aegerion in 2015 but left a year later in 2016 in order to take care of her mother, who was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Watching her mother take part in clinical trials at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston reaffirmed her decision to help life science companies with the legal issues they're having, Filippi said.
"That experience made me even more committed and be passionate about life sciences companies, being on the other side, if you will," Filippi said.
Filippi's practice, which has covered drug safety, global clinical trials, privacy issues, and research and development, makes her "a perfect fit for our team," said Asher Rubin, the global head of Hogan Lovells' life sciences and health care industry group, in a statement.
Filippi left Aegerion a year before the U.S. Department of Justice accused the company of failing to give health care providers adequate information about one of its products, Juxtapid, a cholesterol regulator for patients with a rare genetic disorder that causes people to have abnormally high levels of cholesterol.
Aegerion agreed to plead guilty to violating the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in September 2017, paying out $35 million to resolve a variety of civil and criminal complaints and was placed under federal oversight. Aegerion filed for bankruptcy earlier this year and the company's owner, Novelion, announced that Aegerion was being sold to Europe-based Amryt Pharma PLC.
Officials with the firm, which represented the former chief operating officer of Aegerion in False Claims Act litigation, declined to comment when asked about the matter. A firm spokeswoman added, with regard to Filippi's former role at the company: "Suzanne had no involvement with the matter. She is a corporate lawyer."
The firm also touted Filippi's prior role as the senior securities and M&A counsel for TripAdvisor, which is headquartered in Needham, a Boston suburb, from 2011 to 2013. Filippi "spearheaded" TripAdvisor's $9 billion spinoff from online travel company Expedia and its initial public offering, according to Hogan Lovells' announcement.
Before joining TripAdvisor, Filippi was a senior corporate associate at Goodwin Procter, which is also based in Boston, from 2006 to 2010. She was an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York from 2002 to 2006.
More than a dozen major law firms have opened up offices in Beantown in recent years. From 2013 to 2018, the number of Am Law 200 firms with Boston offices increased 16%, according to ALM Intelligence's Legal Compass.
This story has been updated to clarify a statement by Hogan Lovells.
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