About

The Takeda Pharmaceuticals area legal head for Asia Pacific position was created in 2015, and was filled by Berenice Lim shortly afterwards. Upon taking over, Lim got to work ‘shaping the organisational culture through policy and standard operating procedure changes and supporting the transformation of Takeda from primary care provider to a leading innovative pharmaceutical company’. This journey, she says, ‘highlights the importance of agility and resilience’, as well as the role that ‘courage, fairness and kindness’ plays among leaders when constructing a new legal function. Lim’s newly-created team was active quickly, most recently supporting merger filings across multiple jurisdictions, particularly with the acquisition of Shire and various other integration work-streams. ‘The team’s first four initiatives established a lean and agile legal department equipped to provide quality and efficient legal support during transformational changes across the company’, Lim recalls. Since then, Lim believes that perhaps the most important transactions the team has been involved with have been supporting Takeda’s Access To Medicines initiatives from 2016 through to 2018, which have led to the company Takeda jumping ten places in 2018 on the Access To Medicine Index to rank fifth.