What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and/or your legal team have recently been involved in?

Acted as lead in-house counsel on Caidya’s latest US $165 million strategic growth equity investment from Rubicon Founders closed in January 2025 — reported to be the largest private-equity financing in global clinical-CRO sector in the past 12 months. The transaction delivered record equity capital for the company’s expansion into oncology, rare-disease and paediatric trials across 23 countries/regions, and also required coordination of a cross-functional team across multiple time-zones to compress a tight signing/closing timeline, showcasing our team’s ability to deliver complex, high-value global transactions that directly advance corporate strategy.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?  

I keep the legal function calm and decisive when crisis hits: spot the biggest risks early, give the business clear, pre-approved options, and stay close to the operational teams so we can keep contracts, regulators and reputation intact while others are still scrambling for answers. By turning uncertainty into a short list of legally safe, commercially sensible moves, we protect business, keep trials running, patients safe and emerge with both compliance and credibility stronger than before. For example, our team maintains a living risk playbook that links every type of projects / contracts the company is engaged with, so we can instantly see which obligations will bite if an external or internal shock hits. We then leverage pre-approved decision trees to move from trigger to action in hours, not days. The result is a legal function that converts volatility into structured options.
 

AI has been taken seriously as a potentially revolutionary technological change in the legal world for a number of years now. Has it had a meaningful impact in how your legal team works in this time?

AI has moved from slide-deck promise to our team’s daily toolkit, but only after we ring-fenced it. We are in the process of adopting an AI-featured contract-management workflow that covers incoming CDA, MSA and service agreements, pings us when a clause drifts outside pre-approved risk bands. The same tool compares business practices to our SOP library, playbook and template set, flagging where a business process needs tightening and proposing redlines for counsels’ further review before release. These touches shorten cycle times and keep our templates evergreen without burning lawyer hours on cut-and-paste edits. More importantly, we make sure we turn AI into a secure accelerator rather than a new hidden liability, meaning we ensure zero exposure of any business-sensitive data or trade secrets when using such AI tools, and we always put manual review of all AI-generated content before release.

What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?

For day-to-day legal works, the default is always in-house: we know our business, our sponsors and our sites, so we could always work faster and cheaper. However, as a company offers complete Phase I-IV clinical research and development solutions across over 23 countries and regions, we face multi-jurisdiction challenges in a highly regulated business sector, and this is where we bring in external legal resources for the regulatory nuances, we can’t ethically handle ourselves. Additionally, we always bring in global firms to work side-by-side with our in-house team to ensure execution of major global strategic transactions and initiatives. We keep a shortlist of proven local specialists and global firms on three tracked metrics: speed, results, and price. That balance keeps routine matters in-house and buys us specialist firepower exactly where and when we need it.