Biotech Leadership: How Jean Liu Mastered The Shift From GC To Board Roles

Biotech leadership requires a unique blend of scientific acumen, legal expertise, and business savvy, a combination that our guest Jean Liu embodies perfectly. In this episode, we dive deep with Jean, a biotech executive and seasoned board member with a robust scientific background and over 20 years of experience as a chief legal officer, including her roles at Halozyme and CJ Inc. Jean shares her unique journey from molecular biology to law school, and ultimately, to the boardroom, discussing how her scientific training shaped her legal career and how her GC experience now informs her approach to board service. We explore the exhilarating yet volatile world of biotech, the challenges and triumphs of scaling legal departments, and the invaluable lessons learned from riding the waves of wild success and wild failure. Tune in for a fascinating conversation packed with wisdom for anyone looking to transition between roles, industries, or even career paths, and discover how to leverage diverse skills to excel in leadership positions.

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Biotech Leadership: How Jean Liu Mastered The Shift From GC To Board Roles

Our guest is Jean Liu. Jean is a brilliant lawyer with a science background who has transitioned from the GC chair to the boardroom. This was a fascinating conversation full of wisdom for people wanting to do either or both roles. Stay with me to the end, where I’ll share my key takeaways from the episode. The show is sponsored by Inside Counsel Academy, where in-house counsel go to elevate their careers while enhancing their lives. Also by GeneralCounselWest, a law firm that supports GCs of healthcare companies and their teams with an inside council mindset.

I’m here with Jean Liu. Jean is a biotech executive and board member with scientific training and twenty-plus years in the biotechnology industry as a chief legal officer and other business roles. Currently, she’s serving on two public company boards and a private company board. Before that, she was the GC of Halozyme Therapeutics. More recently, the Chief Legal Officer of Seagen Inc., Long before that, we were law students together at Columbia in the same graduating class. We studied for the California Bar Exam at the same time on the campus of her alma mater, Stanford. Jean, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Joe. It’s so great to be here.

From Molecular Biologist To Legal Mind: Jean Liu’s Origin Story

I want to spend some time talking about how the GC role led you to board service. Now having been a GC, informs how you approach things as a board member. First, I want to go back in time and have you tell us about what you think got you to the GC role in the first place.

I’ll have to rewind all the way back to law school. As you previewed in my bio, I started off doing science, and that was what I originally thought I was going to do. I switched to the law. When I was in law school, and then when I started my first year in the summer at law firms, I quickly realized that it was fun to use my scientific training in addition to my law training. I loved combining the two. One of the things that is most thrilling about science is that you can dig into the business of it and the science of it, in addition to the law aspect of it.

I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could do that, but all the time?” If you’re in a law firm, you obviously just get cases, whatever they comes to your way. Sometimes they’re like in the electronic arts, which I did, and that was pretty interesting too. I loved the biological sciences. I thought, “If I could get a business role doing this, that could also leverage my law, then that would be it.” Of course, I’ve just described what a general counsel is. A general counsel is largely a lawyer who specializes in the business that the client does.

What scientific training did you have?

When I started undergrad, I did molecular biology, which is the study of how molecules does the molecular part. We’re talking about genes and proteins that are expressed in the body. We’re typically talking about a human body when we’re talking about therapeutics, but it can theoretically be in any living being. It could be like a tree, or it could be a bacteria. It could be a virus. Molecular biology is the understanding of how those molecules are made and expressed in a living being. Of course, how they’re regulated. It’s a very complex science, which is why many people study it and it takes forever.

Law School’s Curveball: Mastering The Art Of Advocacy

Unlike the rest of us, by the time you got to law school, law school must have seemed pretty easy.

It really wasn’t because that was one of the things I discovered, and I will tell in a story about, like, when I went into law school, I did pretty well in science, but my first year in law school, I didn’t. I would say I was a mediocre student. It took me a while to get used to it because writing blue books, in our case, I don’t know what law students do now, but in the case of where you answer questions where there’s no real right answer and it’s more looking at your analysis on understanding the reasons behind why things are decided the way they are.

I think science is pretty good at that, but the expression of it and what I would consider the writing down of it, people make jokes about white scientists not being terrific in that aspect. I think lawyers, our training is to basically be able to be advocates, which is to express whatever our positions are in hopefully the best and the most eloquent way, and the most understandable and most persuasive way. I think that was something I had to learn a lot. I had to start from the beginning and learn well, like in law school.

That makes sense. I hadn’t thought about it in that way, but we do. We present things as if they’re Right, but in fact, they’re our advocacy.

Back to your original question, which is what brought me to being a GC. I just recently had a discussion with one of my good friends from law school, and I had no memory that I wanted to do that in law school. I didn’t think about doing that until I was law firm. She reminds me that I said something to that effect when I was in law school, but I have no memory of it. It could have been that it was deep-seated, and that’s what I wanted to do. I think that I very quickly in law school, after I got into law firms, I started off and first doing intellectual property litigation.

I had a couple of clients who were in the biotech area. I liked it so much that I decided, “Great to be a specialist in that area.” I turned my career when I was a fourth-year associate from doing patent litigation to doing deal work, transactional work. One of the things with a business lens, I wanted to do is I wanted to think about moving the business forward. A lot of litigation, as we all know, you’re fighting about events that happened in the past, particularly in intellectual properties. Did you or did you not use somebody else’s technology?

You’re talking typically about technology because lawsuits typically commence, obviously, when the technology is being used, and potentially and mostly when it’s very profitable and lucrative. It’s backward-looking, and I had a couple of clients where we did a great job for them on the litigation front. The client went away because they were outcompeted or technology absorbed whatever their function is.

I think the lesson I can learn about it was like, “You got to keep your eyes forward and keep looking forward.” Again, it seemed obvious to me that I needed to learn much more about the business and keep looking forward. That’s when I started doing deal work. Once I started deal work, it was also a very natural transition. I probably did it intentionally because I wanted to eventually be a general counsel. I intentionally probably adapted my career to help for that cause.

Jean, for people who are in big law firms now or who have been in the past, must be thinking that’s difficult to do as a fourth-year associate to totally pivot to a new practice group, was it?

It was because, again, like a little bit of dating myself, because it’s been a very long time since I was in a law firm, and I think that a lot of times back in the day, when I think back upon it. It only feels difficult because you probably have to take steps back because they’re not going to treat you with the same experience as a third or fourth year associate. I remembered I knew when I started drafting agreements to Novo.

It was like, you had to go all the way back to probably what first or second year associates did. I had a little bit of an advantage because of my scientific training. I think people wanted me to work on the cases because a lot of times, they had a hard time recruiting lawyers who could understand the technology. I think that they were probably predisposed to want me on their matters because of the scientific training. Joe, now I don’t even know because I feel like there are so many people who come from scientific arts now. It may be that it’s a lot easier to recruit people.

Maybe I’ll come back and say, “Maybe it is not so easy now. I don’t have a good sense of how easy it is in a law firm.” For me, back then, I think it was still a little rare for people with technical degrees to be in law firms. I think that because of that, I had probably a lot of accommodations and help from people who around me who wanted to see me on their matters, probably because of my science, which was helpful.

Biotech Beckons: Pivoting To In-House Counsel & The Wild Ride Of Biotech

You made that transition successfully. How many years were you at the law firm before you took your first in-house job?

I remember taking my first in-house job when I was maybe five years. I graduated in ‘93, so ‘98 was my first year in-house. That’s like five years later, I guess, something like that.

What role was that you took?

My first title was VP of Legal. As you can imagine, it was a very carefully negotiated title because really what I wanted was to be the first lawyer and the head lawyer in a small startup. It was really small. When I was probably the third senior person hired at the vice president level, there were three founders, and then there were three vice presidents. Make it out alive, maybe employee number 5 or number 6. It was important to me because maybe this is the intention. I wanted to be a general counsel. I asked for a title that wasn’t quite GC, but it effectively was GC. That’s what I did.

Did you earn the GC title then in that same role?

Yes, I did. I got the GC title probably a year or a year and a half later. It was like a formal ask of my boss, and he said yes.

I work in healthcare, but biotech is its own thing. What’s it like being a GC of a biotech company? What are the types of issues that you’re dealing with that maybe are unique to that space?

Biotech is a really unique space. I think that for one, you have to realize that most biotechs are not profitable, like not formally profitable in the sense that even though they can be very large, but not formally have earnings like the way we think about it. It’s because typically, drugs are very prone to failure, like most drugs fail. I know you’ve always heard that. Getting a drug approved is a really big deal, and it’s very rare, but everyone tries, and everyone spends a tremendous amount of money trying to do it.

Though biotech, even though it’s hard, I think a lot of people are motivated because it could be lucrative if you get a good therapeutic. A lot of people are motivated, that’s on the investor side, but a lot of people are also motivated by just the fact that there’s always the Holy Grail, which is curing cancer. In theory, you’re finding a vaccine for a deadly disease. You’re solving a human condition that affects a lot of different people.

There are people with heart disease and kidney disease. These are the big things that affect human beings. A lot of people are chasing it after. Being in a biotech company in any role, I say, “You’ve got to love and you’ve got to be tolerant.” I say most people love the roller coaster ride. It’s like really fast up and fast down. I had the CFO who once said to me, and I had a very memorable quote. He says, “In a biotech company, you’re always on the cusp of wild success or wild failure.” That’s true.

You’re literally on a knife’s edge. He said like, “The knife’s edge of wild success and wild failure.” You’re like, “How could that be?” It is true because consuming biotech companies that then counted down it out because their first therapeutic cause had some safety issues or didn’t look so good, or like Alzheimer’s disease, which everybody’s been chasing after. Talk about a Holy Grail. How many therapeutics have been approved? Very few. The ones that have been approved have been pretty controversial recently. Does that mean that people won’t chase it?

Does it mean that each of the companies that have a solution or propose a therapeutic for it, their stocks have been gyrating like crazy. With the stock price, I think it’s a bit of an index of also how it’s like in the company, because when the stock’s high, then you can raise a lot of money and you can do a lot of deals. Things go crazy. Typically, the reason your stock is high is because there’s some good news for your therapeutic.

You end up having, at that point, to do a lot of deals, raise a lot of money, and then people can put a lot of effort in behind your business because you have more money. You have fuel for it. Things can go wildly crazy and just as quickly, because you have like one’s a foul, you’re therapeutic. It doesn’t work. There’s a safety issue of competitive, who does it better than you. It cannot be used in the therapeutic regimen, which is a lot of many of drugs, like for example, in cancer, that have to be combined with other therapeutics, which are the standard of care.

If it doesn’t combine, there a myriad different reasons why your therapeutic won’t work. If that won’t work, then just as quickly as things go up, things can come down. Being a biotech GC, it’s like a furious offense, defense all the time. Some people love the adrenaline, and some people hate it. I’ve known people who’ve done who’ve basically cannot get enough of it. Some people like that this is with dogs, and they leave. It’s an industry that’s very unique, and you have to love it to say that.

Thank you for that. Before that, you made the pivot to a new practice area, then you made the pivot to in-house, and you became the GC. What was the next pivotal career moment for you?

Handling Crisis & Uncertainty: Learning To Thrive In Chaos

Joe, you’re a GC too. I think this is one of the things that anybody who listens to us, you very quickly realizes. There are grades of seeing or understanding, is that you only have one client when you’re a GC. If you’re an in-house lawyer, you only have one client. That means you don’t have a diversity of clients. That’s like a real con. It can be a pro, but it can be a real con. The pro is that you understand the business and you can concentrate your acumen, and you can learn about the business in a very linear and directed way.

That’s very helpful. You become a specialist, and that’s why people like you. The native side was, of course, you only have one client, and the client isn’t very good, and the company doesn’t have a business issue, or things don’t go well. Your career is basically stuck in that company. You only have one client. In the law firm was like, “That client lost their lawsuit. That’s okay. I’ve got like, hopefully several other clients are doing it here.”

Here, you’re in the GC. Basically, the company is your business, and you could be an excellent lawyer, but if the company doesn’t do well, guess what? That’s where you are. I think that when I became a general counsel, I keep emphasizing this is when you go in-house, the business is key to both your success and not success. As a result of that, it becomes a combination of your acumen as a lawyer, but also a huge aspect of it is luck, and also, did you choose well in terms of your clients and the business?

Also, did the business people, including yourself, who are working at the company, do a good job? It’s a combination of all of those. Sometimes you could do the best job. We all know this. You can do the best job possible. Sometimes, you just don’t get the breaks because the industry is different, and everything else. Back to what did I do next? I worked for a series of small biotech companies, and I picked up a lot of skills and I picked up a lot of skills on like basically handling a lot of tumult and not all of the good. I rode the gyrations of stock.

My first client took public, and then the stock dropped at the time because it was the dot-com boom and bust of like early 2000s. Biotech is super hot. Biotech was super not hot. I’ve written that cycle so many times now. As a result of it, I felt as if I wanted to learn the skills of how to deal with the crisis. I’ve learned that skill. Being a biotech GC, I think you learn very well how to handle bad news, safety issues, disclosure issues, industry level issues.

We’ve got lots of news about the FDA and healthcare in general. You should learn to handle it and roll with the punches. I’ll confess. When I first started as a GC, there were times when I was just frightened. I was like, “Does that really happen? What am I going to do about it?” I just saw the deer in the deer-in-the-headlights moments, and there were many of them. I had to say, like in the beginning, it was like a lot of deer in the headlight moments, which is what do I do now?

Many of the things that I realized were what you were going to do about it now, many of them weren’t legal. Many of the issues were like, “If disclosing this matter will clearly cause a lot of dislocation of our investors, etc.” You learn about like, “What are you going to do about it?” I think you become extremely tolerant of, “It’s not as bad as you think. It is not as good as you think. Anything good or bad is not as extreme as you think.”

You have to be clear and level-headed. “What’s the first thing I need to do?” I spent a lot of time calling myself, and this is like through decades of experience. It’s like I still do this thing when I get something that is very high or very low, I go, “Get a grip, take a deep breath. What’s the first thing you have to do? What is the number one important thing that you have to do?” You triage it because that’s the only way you can describe calm yourself and get going, and through repetition, you get better and better at it. That’s what happens.

You seem so composed in Zen, and what I’m hearing is that it came over time.

Everything in life it comes over time. Do you remember Joe? I remembered when I was a first-year lawyer, and I used to see those letters that senior people would draft. I’m like, “How do they write in such beautiful English. They sound so authoritative and so good.” I was like, “I cannot even draft a transmittal letter and I sound like retarded drafting a transmittal letter.” It’s 23 years back, you look back and you’re like, “I still feel that way sometimes.” Like, “I’m just not sure that I’ve expressed myself that well.” Obviously, we get better after, and practice makes perfect. We get that over time.

One of the memories that I have early on in law school was this notion that you’re reading an opinion, and maybe it’s by Justice Cardozo, and you’re to critique it. “What’s wrong with this thinking? Are you kidding me? Who am I to question?” You go through that learning curve, and then you cannot not question things, part of being trained as a lawyer. Now take me to that next transition point.

Maybe I’ll just like go back to my first biotech company. What I learned to do was take the company public and establish legal operations from scratch. That’s hiring intellectual property, hiring contract people, and trying to do operations. I was the jack of all trades for the longest time. I was like one lawyer. You get to do everything. You learn to think like a business person and make decisions.

I think one of the other things that we talk about being in-house is that instead of looking for a client to make a decision about something, you have to make a decision, the client is looking to you. This is the biggest difference with basically being in-house versus outside in a law firm, because the outside law firm asks the client, “What do you want to do?” You’re in an in-house, like the business people are looking at you as like the lawyer. “What should we do?”

They’re asking you to do it. You’re like doing it. You’re making a decision. Learning how to do that and not being super scared about that. Learning how to do it, frankly. In my first and second jobs, I did a lot of partnering deals, like a lot of corporate transactions, licensing, collaborations, and different things like that. I think my second job, like with Halozyme, a lot of what we did was partnering collaborations. We had a specialized technology that was a beautiful technology that worked well with large-molecule drugs.

It’s a technology that’s being used by almost all the major big biotech companies now to basically turn an IV infusion for therapeutic into something that can just be delivered in a subcutaneous injection. It’s a great technology. We did a lot of partnering deals, handling collaborations. My third job in-house was at Seattle Genetics initially, and then they became Seagen. It was like a cancer therapeutic company. We were in the process of proving out that antibody drug conjugates, which is a novel platform for a cancer therapeutic.

The idea is to take the specificity of an antibody and then attach to it a small molecule or that can kill or, somehow, of course, it can kill the cancer cell or it can modulate it in some ways. Sometimes there are ways of trying to affect the cancer cell. The first initial ones were all like chemotherapeutics, which were intended to just kill the cancer cell. It’s basically a directed way of hitting just theoretically targeting just the cancer cell and not the surrounding tissue. Seagen, I think it was literally one of the pioneers in that field, and it did extremely well.

It brought on several antibody drug country hits, which we have become a very important drug. I worked with a great management team that basically took that. When I got to the company, they had launched their first drug, and then they increased the number of labels the drug got. In addition, they brought in several new drugs. From that company, I learned how to continue to do a lot of deals, continue to basically do a lot of complex M&A transactions. Like we were very interested in acquiring drugs and requiring other companies licensing in drugs and technology. We did a lot of that.

In my second company, we not only licensed out our technology, but we also licensed in and acquired a large technology at my third company. That was my last in-house job. The company in 2023 got acquired by Pfizer at the very end of the year in December. That was a culmination of basically a lot of work. Seattle Genetics, Seagen, was a company that was very successful in improving our ADCs. There were many people who were very interested in the company had been for many years. It was a combination of sorts and cemented the prowess and the success of Seagen, and doing antibody drug conjugates to attract a prominent company such as Pfizer to be very interested in us.

Scaling The Legal Department: From Startup To 70+ Team

What did your department look like during your tenure at Seagen before they were acquired?

When I got to Seagen, the entire department was like in the combined legal group, we had intellectual property, we had always corporate compliance in biotech, and probably in your world, Joe compliance is a huge portion of it, and it resided in the legal group and my company. When I started, maybe I want to say it was like seventeen people, including myself, and not all of those are lawyers.

I would say probably ten lawyers and people with JDs, even though I think two of those people were JDs who worked in compliance. That included intellectual property lawyers, maybe 3 or 4 people were intellectual property lawyers, and then a few transactional lawyers. We had some paralegals. Maybe it was fifteen. I don’t know. At the very end, I want to say that we had a legal group that was in the seventies.

What timeframe was this? How many years?

This was from 2014 to 2023.

Pretty significant growth.

Yeah, very much. Seagen, when I started, it wasn’t just a legal group. Think if anything, the legal group was very commensurate with the growth of the rest of the company experience because at the period of time, Seagen, we started off with one medicine, and at the very end, we had four therapeutics. You can imagine how much infrastructure and personnel, and additional people, had to basically fund that growth.

Were you growing the legal department through acquisitions, or were all those new hires?

They were all new hires. I cannot remember very many. I know that through some of the acquisitions, we got some technical people, but I cannot remember legal members who joined our team after the results of deals or acquisitions. Mostly new hires.

What are the things that, toward the end of your tenure, you knew as a GC that you wished you had known back when you had your first GC role?

I think one thing I learned was to be okay with uncertainty. I was never a person who loved uncertainty. Maybe it’s just like I always wanted to know, “What’s the outcome? How’s it going to end? How’s it going to end? What’s the end zone? What’s the end goal?” I can get there. Like, “There you go. Go to the right, and that’s where you want to end up. You want to be in Rhode Island, you’ve got to go in that direction.”

I think a lot of what I learned was that you got to be comfortable not always knowing exactly where it’s going. I think that if I had known that earlier, I think I maybe would have enjoyed the ride a little bit more. Again, it’s hard to rewind and think back. I think one of the things that I wish I knew and I didn’t get so much later is that it’s okay not to be the person talking. I think a lot of times people think lawyers are spoken and they want to be telling people things. Here’s what to do. Here’s what not to do.

I think a lot of times that’s not the right answer. I think the right answer for a lot of lawyers is to first really undisquisitely understand the problem and to realize that a lot of times the legal solution is not the answer. I think the answer starts off with what does the client needs and what does it want to do. Those are the organs that the company should do. Now that’s a great segue into talking about looking at the board of directors.

In the end, it’s about, like, what is the strategic direction of the company? The number one rule of any lawyer, in-house or out, but specifically in-house, because that’s our job is to implement the strategic direction of the company, is to understand what is the strategic direction of the company. A lot of what we do is to explain the strategic direction is informed a lot by the law. For example, the company wants to raise a lot of money. Of course, it matters. What’s the funding environment? Can you finance it or your public company?

Do you have the wherewithal? Those things, but in the end, the decision of what we do is up to the board of directors, the management of the company and general counselor or management of the company, but it’s to understand that well before you open your mouth and start talking about the law and be okay with just listening a lot and understanding the business. I wish I had known that more and felt more comfortable with that. Those are two things that just come to mind. I’m sure there are others. I could just go on and on.

Boardroom Bound: Transitioning From GC To Strategic Leader

Your board service, did that predate the acquisition of Seagen or did that come out?

It did. It was also a deliberate pivot because, in general counsel, we’re always in the boardroom. I think that when I talk to most general counsel, they know who’s a good board member, who’s not a very good board member. They know there’s a well-functioning board. They also know when a board is not well functioning. In fact, a lot of times, people when they when boards go to the lawyers, it’s always because they’re like they’re having some issue. I think that when I was in the boardroom so often, I was like, “This seems fun.”

It’s not what the sausage is made. This is where the strategic direction is made. The sausage gets made after the war decides what to do. Sometimes, maybe I should say the sausage is also made when people do robust deliberations and discussions. Maybe that’s also a strategy. The strategy sausage is being made in the boardroom as well. It’s like many things that you talk about, which is the role of the board is to set the strategic direction of the company, but it has to be informed by the facts on the ground.

That comes from management. A little bit, it’s the garbage in, garbage out. If management doesn’t tell the board exactly what’s going on, then we have lots of situations like Worldcom and things like that, where you have to know whether it’s true or not is a different issue. You have a lot of board members who swear on a stack of Bibles that they didn’t know the accounting, the books were being cooked. They didn’t know that we were doing all these different shenanigans.

We’ve had corporate scandals where people say the boards of directors, the directors didn’t know X, Y, and Z. Sometimes that’s true. I tend to be a little bit of a medium, which is that I do think that it’s harder than you would think. You think that if you’re a director, you understand everything that goes on in the company. Sometimes, if you’re not told, how do you know? You’re not in the company. You don’t get to go in and inspect what’s going on. Now you of course have the power to do.

You’re told what you’re told unless you’re digging in.

Yeah, and then when you’re digging in, it’s obviously usually because you don’t trust the management or there’s something real crisis brewing. Which is also the thing. Being a director is like sometimes you have to be it’s like a microscope. Again, use my science. Sometimes you have to focus down on the small things. Sometimes you have to step way back and see the big picture, and you have to both focus down and you have to also distance yourself to see the big picture and see where it sits.

Going back to the theme, like I think of my life a lot as I’ve gotten older, about like, “What skills can I learn? How can I still continue to grow my skills and gain new experiences?” For me, I wanted to be a board member because I wanted to be able to see, do that, basically see the big picture, understand the business, be part and parcel of citing the strategic direction of the company, and participating in that. I think it’s super fun. It was deliberate. I joined all three of my boards while I was still sitting chief legal officer for Seagen.

How did you make that happen?

A couple of different ways. One is that people will tell you this, and it’s so true. It’s like, “It just seems so simple. How could it be?” It is so simple in some ways, which is that you tell people that you want to be a board member. I realized that I had a lot of rent. By the time I was 30-plus years out of law school and had been in the industry for that long, I had lots of people who had grown up to be CEOs and directors, and senior members of companies like. I told them that I was interested in being a board member. I started having people tell me, “There’s this company, there’s that company, there’s this company, that company.”

That was one. The other way I did it was that I went to a networking session with a group that was very focused on raising and increasing the number of women sitting on boards in biotech. It was called Boardroom Ready. It was sponsored by Women In Bio, which is, Bio is of course, the industry group for many biotech companies. It’s one of our largest industry groups, and they had a subset which is basically focused on women. That group sponsored a program that was held in many multiple years, got a cohort of very qualified women who were already qualified to serve on boards.

The idea was to create a networking system. They matched this up with mentors who were ready women sitting directors. They gave foundational knowledge to a lot of people about board members do including understanding financial statements and understanding what is the role of an audit committee and what like is the role of like nominating corporate governance committee. Everything from basics to rehearsed, like what do you do in this crisis? How do you interact, like compensation, which is a huge deal now for us, is it for board members?

It took place in like over a week. That networking group was also a font of like possible opportunities. I got a great mentor there. He introduced me to some people who then helped me introduce to one of my other boards. One of them I just got because I knew somebody from a prior job, and I met the person before, and he and I had interacted a little bit on different other opportunities. His company went public, he was thinking, “It’d be nice to have somebody with your experience and the acumen.” He and I talked, and I was like, “I’d love to be a board member.” It was a combination of everything. Networking, telling people about it, and obviously, a more formal industry group networking. I think all of the above is important.

How do you think having been a GC, a chief legal officer, has informed how you govern as a board member?

The funniest thing is that people make the remark repeatedly to me is that I don’t act like a lawyer. I think in general, people look to me for legal expertise, and they’ll say, “Jean, you’re the lawyer, what would you do in a situation like this? It’s very focused on legal.” Sometimes it’s essential to lead with it. For my part, most times I think about, again, we can talk about the tactics and we can talk about what we do, and legal is usually one of them, and what’s permissible and what’s not sets the boundaries I get.

A lot of it starts with most time, what you want to do is legal. That may not be a good idea. Most time, what you do is legal. It starts with, again, what do you want to do, and where is the business going, and what can you do about it? I spend a lot of time asking very open-ended questions about where we want to go and what this treated direction of the company. I think that if anything, being a lawyer informs me. Again, I guess I’m always repeating myself, which is that it’s not about the law.

It’s really about where does the business needs to go. Where should it go? We can come in afterwards and establish how do we pull the levers? What are the tactics? What are the important things? Most times, even if you cannot do this, you can do it in any way. That’s what good lawyers do. That can happen. There are lots of in-house and outside counsel who can advise on that very easily.

If you cannot do a financing this way, you cannot do an equity deal. You can do a death deal. The upshot is, do you want to raise money now? Is it super dilutive for your stockholders to raise money? When is the right time? You’re developing a drug. “Do you want to wait until later?” It’s more risky. What if your results aren’t very good? You run out of money. If you decide to wait until later, but then it’s less dilutive. If you do it earlier, it could be dilutive. It turns out that if the therapeutic does well, then you’ve just sold a lot of stock cheaply.

You may have some disgruntled investors, like we should have known. Of course, in high times, everything is there, but you understand what I mean. It’s not per se whether you can do something. It’s really about what’s the right thing for the business. I spend a lot of time reminding probably other board members that before we jumped straight to like, “Can it be done?” We should talk about, like, “Is that a good idea?” Only when we thrash that out do I basically go, “How do we do it?”

What’s Next? Jean Liu’s Vision For The Future

Jean, this has been a fascinating conversation. I’ve learned so much. Thank you for all that you’ve shared. I want to ask you as you turn your next chapter, what are you looking forward to?

Back to the thing, which is, I feel like for myself, I want to continue to grow and learn. We’re like I would say late tish in our career. I don’t have an aspiration to go back to a law firm. I don’t have an aspiration to be a general counsel immediately. Maybe that would change, but certainly not right now. I’m loving being a director on boards. I’m also looking to do other interesting things that are none of those above, because I think one of the greatest things, I am in a very privileged position of basically choosing what else I want to do.

I would love to continue to learn and develop new skills that I just don’t have. I know there are a lot of skills that I don’t have, and I’d love to do that. I’d love to policy something I want to do. I don’t want to be going into politics. Let’s just be perfectly honest. Understanding policy, understanding how we can do things that are maybe bigger than just operations, individual corporations, but doing things like tackling new technology areas.

One of the things that I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to people about is like, if people found new companies, therapeutic areas like the cancer is one of those and autoimmune disease, which I have is like those as therapeutic areas that I want to contribute to in some way. It doesn’t have to be in the law, though, of course, that’s helpful, but I’d love to help with companies in that area.

Now I don’t know what that help means. I’ve learned a lot that just talk about the industry, and I’d love to continue that. It can be in the form of anything. It could be make it out. Helping to found a company could be helping with putting people together. Being on the board of those companies introducing people to that that’s one one aspect of it.

The other thing I’m focusing on is some basically not for profits which are maybe industry groups or people who are like developing novel areas that are helpful for science and society. Those are things that I might be very interested in doing just again in the service of learning, rather than just because I don’t want to do what is given, the choices that I have to repeat, like what it is that I’ve done before. It’s a little vague, I’ll tell you. It’s been really hard.

I cannot wait to see where it goes. Thank you so much for being on the show and sharing all of that with our readers. Appreciate it.

Sure, Joe. Talk to you soon. Take care.

Take care.

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Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed our time with Jean. I know I did. A few key things I’ll take from this episode are her description of the experience of working in a biotech company as a series of wild successes and wild failures. The fact that she was able to secure seats on multiple public company boards while still sitting in a GC role. That’s a testament to the wide range of values she brings to the table and also to the fact that it’s not impossible. Until next time, this is Joe Schohl. For more tips on accelerating your path to becoming a world-class general counsel, visit InsideCounselAcademy.com and connect with me directly on LinkedIn.

Important Links

• Jean Liu On LinkedIn
• Inside Counsel Academy
• GeneralCounselWest
• Halozyme Therapeutics
• Joe Schohl on LinkedIn
• Women In Bio

About Jean Liu

Jean Liu is a seasoned biotechnology executive and board director with over two decades of leadership experience across public and private life sciences companies. With a background in scientific training and a proven track record in both legal and business leadership roles, Jean has built a reputation as a strategic advisor and operational leader in the biotech sector.

Most recently, Jean served as Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary at Seagen Inc., where she led the legal and compliance functions through a period of significant growth, culminating in the company’s acquisition by Pfizer in 2023. Prior to Seagen, she was Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary at Halozyme Therapeutics, where she also oversaw business development and established the company’s compliance framework during its first product commercialization.

Jean is an active board member for several innovative biotech companies. She serves on the board of Erasca, Inc., a clinical-stage oncology company, where she is also a member of the Audit Committee. At Connect Biopharma, a global company addressing chronic inflammatory diseases, she chairs the Nominating and Governance Committee and serves on the Audit Committee. She is also a board member at Angarus Therapeutics, a private oncology-focused biotech.

Her areas of expertise include business and legal strategy, corporate governance and board operations, strategic transactions, equity and debt fundraising, licensing and collaborations, mergers and acquisitions, public company compliance, intellectual property, commercial and operational contracting, and regulatory and corporate compliance.