Matthew Maletta has worn several hats while helping Irvine-based Allergan Inc. diversify its product line and grow to nearly $5 billion in yearly sales.
Maletta is an Allergan vice president and its corporate secretary and associate general counsel.
With all that on his plate, he’s not afraid to ask for help, often counting on outside counsel when it comes to big deals.
“You want to be more of a coach as opposed to a player,” Maletta said.
Maletta was one of five lawyers recognized last month at the Business Journal’s 2nd annual General Counsel Awards at the Hyatt Regency Irvine. The 40-year-old—who joined the maker of Botox, other drugs and medical cosmetics in 2002—received the Rising Star award.
The deals Maletta has worked on include: the $3.4 billion buy of Santa Barbara-based Inamed Corp. in 2006; $370 million for New Jersey’s Esprit Pharma Inc. in 2008; a $230 million deal for Oculex Pharma- ceuticals Inc. of Sunnyvale in 2003; and a $150 million buy of Aczone, an acne treatment, from QLT Inc. of Vancouver in 2008.
Outside Help
Maletta said that in-house lawyers are well-served by “really allowing the outside experts to take the lead” on mergers and acquisitions.
“I’m not an M&A expert, but we hire M&A experts, so it would be a disservice to Allergan for me to get in their way. We rely on the experts to do a great job for the company,” he said.
Maletta credits his insights on big deals to working with Douglas Ingram, Allergan’s longtime general counsel who now runs the company’s Eur-opean, Middle Eastern and African operations.
“Doug is really unique … (he has) so much passion and intellectual curiosity and, really, legal brilliance about him,” Maletta said.
Maletta said he “just tried to absorb as much as I could” from Ingram when he first arrived at Allergan, including the idea that “you want to be the client that the lawyers want to work with.”
Maletta arrived as a staff attorney and soon was thrown into the fire as Allergan got ready to spin off its medical device unit into what became Advanced Medical Optics Inc.
Advanced Medical now is known as Abbott Medical Optics and based in Santa Ana.
“On that deal, I much more served as a backup,” he said. “Aimee Weisner (then Allergan’s vice president and assistant general counsel) really led that deal with Doug.”
In those days, Maletta focused on “Allergan stuff” while Weisner concentrated on spinning off Advanced Medical.
Maletta got a chance to play a bigger role a few years later, when Allergan spent $3.4 billion to buy Inamed Corp. of Santa Barbara. That deal added lower-face filler Juvéderm, breast implants and the Lap-Band weight loss device to the company’s roster.
Ingram led the deal, with Maletta helping out as Allergan ended up in a bidding war with rival Medicis Pharmaceutical Corp. of Scottsdale, Ariz. That led to deeper involvement on negotiating documents, signing and closing the deal and helping to integrate Inamed into Allergan.
Maintaining Culture
Maletta said his key challenge these days is continuing to maintain the culture that Ingram created in Allergan’s legal department, which counts some 60 attorneys.
Maletta also took over the company’s human resources department for about five months last year, reporting directly to Chief Executive David Pyott.
“I worked with David very closely, and I’m happy to say David is everything that he’s advertised to be in terms of how brilliant he is, how ethical he is, how strategic he is,” Maletta said.
Maletta graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School.
He worked at a small firm in Minnesota and went on to stints with Skadden, Arps in Chicago and Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison LLP in Colorado before joining Allergan.
Outside the office, Maletta serves as a board member of the OM Foundation, which is dedicated to building therapy centers for children with disabilities in the U.S. and internationally.
