Connecting with Companies: a Guide to Consulting Agreements for Biomedical Scientists

Academic scientists often find it challenging to negotiate consulting agreements with biotechnology or pharmaceutical companies. The legal language can be confusing, anxieties can occur on both sides, specifics concerning stock shares and options can be obscure, and there are pitfalls aplenty, yet raising objections or making counterproposals may feel awkward and potentially risky.

This book is an essential guide for academic scientists and physicians considering consulting work in biomedicine. The authors, a seasoned attorney and a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, have extensive experience in reviewing and negotiating consulting agreements. In an accessible style, they guide scientists through key contractual issues, including intellectual property management, confidentiality, fees, indemnity, and stock options and classes, as well as the laws such agreements must satisfy.

As the science of biomedicine continues to skyrocket, biomedical consulting has become an attractive option for a wider range of career stages. This is the most authoritative and practically useful handbook available to any scientist considering this important step in career advancement.

Edward Klees is General Counsel at the University of Virginia Investment Management Company, where he works on private equity and hedge fund investment and legal issues relating to general investment management. He is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and Vice Chair of the American Bar Association's (ABA) Institutional Investor Committee. Klees frequently speaks on institutional investment issues at the ABA and other legal and investment conferences. Formerly, he was Associate General Counsel at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He has extensive background in the review and negotiation of biomedical consulting contracts.

H. Robert Horvitz is currently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is Professor of Biology and a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. He is also an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He currently serves as the Chair of the Board of Trustees for Society for Science & the Public and is a member of the Board of Trustees at Massachusetts General Hospital. Horvitz shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sydney Brenner and John Sulston. In 2009, he was named a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.