About

Formerly one of Pfizer’s ‘star lawyers’, when Zoetis was spun out recently, Heidi Chen found herself involved in building a public company operation from scratch. As a result, she now faces the mammoth task of ensuring she has an adequate and appropriately sized team in place at her new home. ‘We are very deliberately building a high-performing legal function’, she says. The odds of her succeeding are high; her team had previously been praised by one of the company’s most senior operations as ‘one of the most entrepreneurial legal teams’ he’d ever known, and it has been known to generate income for the company through patent work. ‘Being entrepreneurial means knowing the law, understanding the business, spotting emerging trends, and then putting this all together to drive positive results for Zoetis’, explains Chen. ‘I take a holistic approach to lawyering. This approach is contagious and you can see this in the way we work with our business leaders and each other as lawyers. I am really proud of our colleagues and the culture we are developing’. She likes to work with law firms who will ‘engage in risk-sharing on the fee front’, and says she’d like more law firms to be open about their shortcomings. ‘No-one is good at everything, but few firms will concede that’.