Dr. Deniz Tschammler
Practice Focus Area: Health and Life Sciences
Office: Munich/Frankfurt
Years at Firm: 2
What is your favorite part about practicing healthcare law at McDermott?
Apart from exciting clients and projects, a great privilege of my work at McDermott is to closely collaborate with a wide range of inspiring and outstanding health and life sciences lawyers – in our German offices, across Europe and the US. I am regularly working on large collaboration, market entry or compliance projects that involve multiple jurisdictions and/or require different legal perspectives. In such projects, it is invaluable to be surrounded by the right team of experts. After more than two years at McDermott, I am still impressed to see how quickly you find such helpful team across all offices. Moreover, everyone shares the same attitude and passion for achieving our clients’ goals. It is magnificent to be a part of this.
What is the biggest opportunity and greatest challenge facing clients in your area of focus today?
For many clients, the answer is digitization. At great speed, digitization is turning the health markets upside down. Digital health has started to revolutionize research and development, create entirely new ways of diagnosing and treating diseases, make the patient’s trip to the doctor or pharmacy unnecessary, and facilitate communication among all public and private players in the various health markets. This not only results in abolition and liberalization of outdated legal regimes, but also in new regulatory restrictions and challenges, such as new product requirements (e.g., for AI-based medical devices) or increasing data protection restrictions (e.g., for companies processing sensitive health data). Some of this we are already seeing today, much of it we will see in the coming years.
What kind of client work gets you most excited when it comes across your desk?
I enjoy being a legal advisor, but it is even more enriching to be a strategic advisor to our clients, especially in highly regulated health markets. Our clients not only want to know which courses of action are legally possible but also, and above all, which are practically feasible and commercially advisable. The recommendations we make as lawyers must be compatible with the client’s commercial objectives. Putting myself in our clients’ shoes and finding the best solution to their problems – this is probably what excites me most.
What is the proudest moment of your career to date?
As a young lawyer, there are many reasons to be proud: successfully negotiating the first contract, winning the first lawsuit, closing the first transaction. All this remains a special memory. Over the past years, I have been grateful for every opportunity to grow, and proud about my personal development at all stages of my previous career– from first year associate to partner. The proudest moments for me is when a client regards me as their trusted advisor – the person who is first asked for advice when a critical situation needs to be resolved. It requires hard work, and sometimes years of working with a client, to evolve to a trusted advisor. That is what I strive for every day.
If you were not a lawyer, what career would you pursue?
I might have ended up in the sports media sector. I was completely crazy about sports as a child: I was interested in all kinds of sports (and constantly invented my own), knew all the world records by heart, all the NBA players by name, even the rules of curling. In my nursery, I spent hours as a sports commentator during the Olympic Games – there are still tapes of that. As a lawyer, I am certainly less emotional, but fortunately I have been able to maintain my enthusiasm and enjoyment.
