How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organization’s resilience? 

Companies today operate in a regulatory and legal environment of ever-increasing complexity. Fast-changing markets and VUCA business environments create an even greater need for agile and flexible organisations. The legal and compliance function helps to anticipate and navigate these complexities, and through cross-functional cooperation and proactive involvement, provides solutions and expert guidance on legal and compliance matters.

The adoption of a customer-focused approach (for Bayer, a focus on patients, farmers, and consumers) plays a crucial role in enabling the legal and compliance function to foster a resilient organisation and support its business strategies. Continuous monitoring of the surrounding business environment, along with its corresponding regulatory and legal context and the needs that these are called to address, allows for timely and efficient support of the organisation’s strategies, thereby substantially facilitating a customer-focused approach.

Moreover, the existence of holistic, centralised support on legal and compliance matters of a general character and/or of a recurring nature through centralised service centres and platforms allows local legal and compliance functions to concentrate more effectively on non-standard and strategic tasks.

In summary, customer focus, business acumen and know-how, cross-functional cooperation, and proactive involvement, along with an appropriate structural design for the function, allow the legal department to support and ensure a resilient and flexible business organisation.

What measures has your company taken to embed sustainability practices into its core business operations, and how does the role of the general counsel contribute to driving and ensuring sustainable practices within the company? 

Sustainable development is a fundamental element of Bayer’s global corporate strategy, our business activities, our corporate values, and the way we operate our businesses. Sustainability is at the centre of our corporate mission, ‘Health for all, hunger for none,’ and comprises three core elements for all divisions and functions: inclusive growth and value added for society, reduction of our ecological footprint, and responsible business practices along our value chain.

Moreover, in this context, and as a leading healthcare and agriculture company, Bayer bears a significant responsibility. To ensure that Bayer meets current societal expectations, it has introduced the Bayer Societal Engagement (BASE) principles at a global level to establish how we interact worldwide—not just with our employees, but also with patients, customers, consumers, business partners, political stakeholders, scientists, critics, and our stockholders. The BASE principles are applied in numerous local initiatives and efforts that aim to foster a sustainable environment, address societal needs and inclusiveness, and support our employees’ wellbeing.

My role as corporate counsel is to facilitate and support all efforts towards Bayer’s sustainability goals and relevant initiatives, projects, and ventures, to advance corporate sustainability issues within my organisation, and to act as an enabler for all divisions and functions in driving change towards achieving Bayer’s core sustainability elements. This involves going beyond merely ensuring compliance with global and local sustainability requirements and adopting a leading role in all relevant efforts.

Engaging, cooperating, supporting, and leading by example are all key elements for a corporate counsel’s successful contribution towards driving and ensuring sustainable company practices.