About

Dr Christian Rau has been the chief compliance officer at Olympus since October 2018, having previously served as general counsel EMEA and Latin America at DaVita, where he built, shaped and developed a legal department from scratch in a start-up like environment, recruiting and developing 10 lawyers in five countries and three continents. Prior to that, he worked as vice president and assistant general counsel at Johnson & Johnson, where he was called on to serve on the management board of an international subsidiary, ‘broadening my business acumen and my leadership and management skills’, he says. Despite a short time in his current position, Dr Rau has successfully completed a range of tasks, including conducting a robust review of risks, competencies and functions, achieving a closer cooperation between two separate functions – governance, and compliance and legal. He has integrated privacy and data protection into the broader governance and compliance team, as well as developing the coordination and cooperation between EMEA headquarters in Hamburg and eight sub-regions across EMEA. A highly praised legal professional, Dr Rau has been involved in a number of high profile transactions during the past few years. For example, he advised on and helped facilitate DaVita’s market entry into the challenging Brazilian dialysis market in 2016, accompanying closely the acquisitions of dialysis clinics and helping a quick market penetration with more than 20 clinics, serving more than 4,000 patients across the country. Talking about how he sees the in-house legal role evolving over the next few years, he comments: ‘Machine learning and artificial intelligence will require new strategies and new tools for the in-house legal profession. Also, like law firms, in-house lawyers will have to focus even more on high-growth and high-risk type of work. In addition, digitisation, data protection and cybersecurity will have to be strategically and intellectually combined as areas in which challenges lie, but also opportunities to positively differentiate one legal department from another’.