To get all “legalistic”, that’s pretty much the whole of it. But what that leaves out is how companies use different names in different contexts: “Doing business as” (DBA) names, aka a business trade name, may be fine for HR and Slice n’ Dice – LLC, but get the legal name wrong when you’re “making toxicology lab purchases at 12:01AM on a Friday night,” and you’ll be begging for clinic lead time for the next 6 weeks. (TigerTox clients already know the answers to this – they’re not working at midnight with contracts and study scopes of work. They’re well organized. Study execution has been made efficient. Pro-active planning. It’s just that simple.)
When it comes to drug development, and especially the technical & strategic planning – the lifeblood of a pharmaceutical or biotech company – the legal name of a business is the kind of question every corporate attorney hopes you don’t figure out. And TigerTox is a toxicology partner known for our legally astute C-Suite.
In fact, we built a 36-month strategic planning model on how to align business plans and commercial operational practices. It’s the kind of process that’s made us one of the most trusted outsourced tox providers to biopharma.
Let’s be honest. Your average contract attorney is not going to be great at figuring out your tox pipeline.
Look, you can ask a dozen scientists how to execute a GCLP preclinical study, and they’re all going to give you a different answer. And when it comes to toxicology strategy, that is dangerous. What you want is a partner who can create a full plan for your legal name, tax ID, accounting practices, and lab management that includes the overall business strategy like what we wrote on the top of your proposal: But don’t worry about the number of animals in GLP preclinical studies. Call us, and we’ll walk you through it. Additionally, we have successfully run combined, parallel toxicology studies with a very minimal impact on budgets, and there’s no reason we can’t do it again for you.
That’s not just speculating on how a lab will work: that is linking the macro-pharma vision of drug development to a full toxicology strategy. It’s thinking about laboratory management (and personnel), and what the current state of the industry means for clinical trials.
Which brings us back to, what is a legal company name? It’s an identifier, first and foremost. The DBA name is more important in the day-to-day when it comes to paperwork related to finances, and it’s important on an ongoing level when it relates to research and development or clinical studies. That’s because the DBA name on a commercial study agreement is all that typically matters, and it will trump the legal name of the company. (For a reference point on that, here’s a convenient link: What is a Company’s Legal Name).
It is vital, however, to have the same legal name on all contracts going out that is on record with the IRS for your federal tax ID. That easy mistake can turn into a nightmare for a C-suite and the PIs; it can incur major costs and delays in acquiring resources and managing cashflows.
Pharma needs to be sure of their company’s legal name when it comes to partnering with laboratories, setting an annual budget, and defining the risk level of approved studies. And it is just as important that the laboratories are sure about the legal name they present for a study. It goes both ways.
The process isn’t difficult. In fact, this all ties back to working with the same team of lawyers and scientists when you establish your legal business entity. It’s about getting the DBA name on contracts, and making sure those contracts have the correct legal name on them-long before study execution, and long before Study Director Day 1.
That sounds like a lot of work, and whenever there’s a mess, business gets bogged down in the minutiae, and when it does, operations always suffers. Which is why ultimately, the question of “what is the legal name of a company” leads to the larger question of-what is the goal of a drug development pipeline?