About

Serving as senior legal counsel – manufacturing and logistics at Cochlear, a listed medical device company, Deeksha Kumar is a corporate lawyer with rich cross-jurisdictional experience. Her career began at Deloitte, where she worked on M&A transactions, culminating as a lead lawyer for the transaction period. After five years at Deloitte, she joined the Weir Group as legal advisor for the Asia Pacific region. This role enabled her to gain more generalist commercial legal experience, work collaboratively with sales and procurement teams and provide broad legal advice on various topics such as privacy, competition law, IP and product regulations. Given her strong background in science, Kumar was keen to learn more about Cochlear and the hearing device industry, and thus commenced a role as legal counsel in the procurement area in 2016. She partnered with the procurement team to secure key long term contracts with single source suppliers and achieve supply continuity and pricing benefits. Kumar was then promoted to her current role where she looks after all legal advice required by the supply chain and operations division at Cochlear. Recently, Kumar was part of a team that worked on the smart hearing alliance commercial collaboration between Cochlear and GN Hearing, the hearing aid division of the GN Group, which includes joint research and development and shared technology arrangements. ‘The collaboration is an exciting opportunity to shape the future of hearing and the commercial negotiations were a challenging and rewarding experience’, she says. Kumar has also worked on a number of legal supply chain process improvements, including streamlining touch points between procurement and legal, and putting in place a large number of templates and policies. ‘Of particular note is the terms project, where I worked to combine 10 different sets of supply terms into one publicly available set of terms (published on the Cochlear website) that can be used globally. These terms have been translated into 10 languages and protect the interests of all global Cochlear offices from a supply perspective’, Kumar states. To a large extent, Kumar thinks the proudest achievement of her in-house career is working collaboratively with the business to deliver the company’s mission and business priorities. ‘Upon joining Cochlear, I established a profile as legal advisor to the supply chain and operations division and worked closely with the leadership team of the division to implement timely and commercial legal advice. A team survey showed high level of satisfaction from the business in relation to advice received’, she says. ‘In terms of legal advice, one of my biggest achievements at Cochlear has been an agreement rollout project, which involves strategy, management, development and monitoring’. She continues: ‘The project contributes to Cochlear’s success by putting supply continuity measures in place, including but not limited to parameters around performance, ease of replacement, business growth, financial or other concerns in the supply environment’. Kumar believes that collaboration and trust are the key to help convert rising stars into industry leaders. ‘Legal counsel will only be able to progress and form a profile as industry leaders if business leaders realise the importance of the advice provided and value added by lawyers. Business interests and risk profile must be balanced for the progress of the business, and this can be achieved by developing a relationship of trust between senior leaders and legal counsel. Senior leaders that empower rising stars will help develop industry leaders’, she comments.