A life sciences launch can hinge on decisions made long before a product reaches the market: how teams are staffed, how resources are allocated, how evidence is generated, and how leaders make the internal case for investment. James Drake’s work at Best Practices, LLC centers on helping companies make those decisions with better comparative evidence.

As Vice President of the Medical Affairs Practice, Drake oversees research and benchmarking for clients across the global biopharmaceutical and medical technology sectors. Best Practices builds proprietary data sets contributed directly by participating companies, giving life sciences leaders a clearer view of how peer organizations plan launches, structure medical affairs and commercial operations, assess technology, and identify performance gaps.

In this conversation with The Consulting Report, Drake discusses how benchmarking shapes client decisions, what distinguishes Best Practices’ research model, and how AI is changing both the firm’s analysis and the questions clients bring forward. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Consulting Report: Best Practices works in a specialized area of healthcare consulting. How would you describe the firm’s core focus?

James Drake: Best Practices specializes in "operational research" for the global biopharmaceutical and medical technology sector. Through evidence-based benchmarking, we help life sciences companies build, scale, and optimize their medical affairs and commercial operations.

Over 30 years, we have refined the methodologies required to develop high-fidelity benchmark data sets, contributed directly by participating companies themselves. These proprietary data sets are the foundation of a broad range of high-impact work, including new product development and launch, strategy setting, planning and budgeting, medical affairs evidence generation and impact analysis, and every dimension of commercial operations—from market research, market access, competitive intelligence, and patient support to sales, regulatory, and quality affairs.

Building on this proprietary data foundation, we are increasingly applying AI tools to bring additional rigor and depth to our analysis: surfacing best practices, sharpening launch planning, advancing field medical excellence, and identifying new opportunities for operational optimization. We see our role as trusted advisors and leading practitioners in a rapidly evolving discipline. We take quiet pride in continually innovating how evidence is generated, analyzed, and put to work on behalf of our clients.

The Consulting Report: How does your firm differentiate itself from competitors?

James Drake: Clients tell us that what distinguishes us shows up in several consistent ways. All these differentiators, they say, tend to elevate the overall client experience:

Scale of participation. Our global network of biopharma relationships allows us to build studies with considerably larger participant cohorts than others typically achieve. This reach rests on a proprietary database and on a deliberate exchange of value: every participating company receives meaningful analysis and insight in return for contributing its data.

Rigor where it matters most. Clients regularly point to the strength of our evidence in the most complex and consequential areas of their work—new product launch, medical affairs, technology deployment, regulatory affairs, and market access.

Boutique agility. As a boutique firm, we tailor our approach, question sets, and analytical framework to each client's specific situation. Clients say this is a meaningful contrast to the more standardized, year-over-year instruments larger firms often rely on.

Service-minded and inventive. That same flexibility lets us remain genuinely service-oriented and to keep innovating in how we deliver—shaping engagements around client priorities rather than defaulting to a fixed playbook.

Practical outcomes and visible return. Clients frequently comment on the applied, action-ready nature of our work and on how clearly they can evaluate the return relative to their investment.

“Many of the launches we have supported have gone on to become multi-billion-dollar blockbuster franchises.”

The Consulting Report: Can you share examples of how benchmarking has shaped client decisions?

James Drake: Our work tends to drive impact in three distinct ways, each illustrated by representative client projects.

We partner closely with new product pharma launch teams, drawing on deep data repositories we have built over many years that span every dimension of commercial and medical launch planning—investment levels, staffing, differentiation, innovative applications of technology, team evolution, and rigorous analog analysis. These benchmarks help clients make the internal case for the resources needed to fulfill a product's promise, and to shape their launch plans against real-world evidence from past and concurrent launches. Many of the launches we have supported have gone on to become multi-billion-dollar blockbuster franchises.

Our benchmarking process examines both multi-year past performance and multi-year forward investment commitments, which together allow us to forecast, with a high degree of accuracy, the trends most likely to shape the next three to five years. Numerous medical affairs and commercial clients have used this forward-looking lens to build the case for change, acceleration, and investment needed to maintain—or establish—category leadership.

In one especially memorable engagement, we convened 50 senior scientists and lab leaders from across academia and the commercial landscape to evaluate which emerging cellular technologies would have the greatest impact over a 5-to-10-year horizon across priority therapeutic areas, and which companies appeared best positioned to lead in each. The resulting analysis led our client to invest in the internal infrastructure required to capitalize on those technologies—and to make a $60 million equity investment in one of the emerging companies identified. Less than two years later, the client exited that position with more than $1 billion in return.

“We have learned that AI tools deliver the most value when they are deliberately embedded into our workstreams rather than offered as optional add-ons.”

The Consulting Report: How is AI changing the questions clients bring to Best Practices?

James Drake: Like the rest of the world, we are finding that artificial intelligence is reshaping how we work, what clients ask us to investigate, and what they expect from their partners. We have embraced this shift wholeheartedly, and it is changing our work along four distinct frontiers:

Innovation. AI has meaningfully elevated our ability to generate insight, interrogate our data sets, spot patterns, and connect the dots across large and complex client issues in medical affairs, evidence generation, launch, and commercial operations.

Tools. AI capabilities are rapidly infusing into the tools we already use—and a growing universe of new ones. We are continuously introducing, testing, and stabilizing tools that allow us to do things we either could not accomplish before, or could not do nearly as well: advanced analysis, data visualization, sophisticated queries, written, video, and infographic communication, and implementation planning, among others.

Work processes. Once a new AI use case has been proven, real implementation rigor is 

required to roll it out across all the people, teams, and functions that can benefit. We have learned that AI tools deliver the most value when they are deliberately embedded into our workstreams rather than offered as optional add-ons.

Change management. The rapid pace of AI adoption is requiring ongoing change management. Some colleagues embrace new tools enthusiastically; others find the frequency of change demanding. We try to be thoughtful in helping everyone understand why the shift matters and how it serves them. Change management of this kind is challenging—but we believe it is essential if our firm and our people are to keep growing alongside an industry that is itself evolving quickly.

Taken together, these four frontiers are changing how we deliver and expanding what clients now ask of us. Increasingly, we are engaged not only to benchmark what leading organizations are doing, but to help them think through how AI can be integrated into their own medical affairs, regulatory affairs, launch, and commercial operations responsibly, measurably, and to competitive effect.

The Consulting Report: Is there a book, mentor, or mantra that has influenced how you lead your organization?

James Drake: We are drawn to the philosophy attributed to Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

Over 30 years, our firm has advanced comparative analysis through increasingly sophisticated forms of benchmarking in service of the pharmaceutical and life sciences sector. Throughout, our guiding philosophy has remained consistent: continuous improvement, innovative adaptation, intellectual curiosity, and the confidence to state our views clearly once the analysis warrants them.

We have stood on the shoulders of many important contributors to modern management thought:  Jim Collins on the paradox of humility paired with professional will to do great things; Carol Dweck on the growth mindset that transforms how individuals and organizations learn; Amy Edmondson on the psychological safety that makes curiosity possible at scale; Clayton Christensen on the strategic discipline of questioning one's own certainties to avoid the innovator’s dilemma; and Peter Drucker, whose insistence on continuous learning and "planned abandonment" remains foundational. Each, in his or her own way, reminds us that change, innovation, and growth grow best in the soil of curiosity and humility.Yet the one leadership principle that sits most deeply at our core is also the oldest. Lao Tzu's famous observation captures it entirely: "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Then another. And another.