The highest-value thing an in-house lawyer can do is not explain the law – it is to help the business decide. That is the governing principle Anne Mayrand, head of legal affairs and compliance at Organon Canada in Montreal, Quebec, has spent more than 25 years refining, first at Merck Canada Inc. and now at Organon Canada, a company she helped build from the moment it spun off from Merck's women's health, biosimilar and established-brand portfolio in 2021.
From private practice to pharmaceutical in-house counsel
Mayrand began her legal career at Monette, Barakett, a Quebec health and labour law firm with more than a century of history, practising health law and litigation on behalf of healthcare institutions. The move to in-house work was not planned – a former classmate's outreach drew her to Merck Canada Inc. and its clinical research work, which aligned with her health law background.
What she encountered at Merck was a different world: corporate law, IP and the realities of a multinational she had never encountered in a Quebec boutique. Over the following two decades, she expanded into government affairs and industrial policy, promoting the innovative pharmaceutical industry to the Quebec and Ottawa governments during a review of patent linkage regulations, then created the company's first privacy and compliance officer function following the 2004 launch of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).
That compliance work proved formative. Building the function from scratch – implementing standard operating procedures, training programmes and monitoring systems – shifted her thinking from pure legal permissibility toward risk in execution: how an organization actually behaves in practice, not just what the law technically allows. It also required her to lead without direct authority, influencing across a company where the entire legal team numbered three lawyers, a skill she carries directly into her work at Organon.
The speed-limit test: when in-house counsel earns its place
The most important transition for any lawyer moving in-house, Mayrand says, is learning to keep the legal reasoning internal and surface a clear recommendation. She frames the distinction with a speed-limit analogy: outside counsel confirms the limit is 100 kilometres per hour, but when a company wants to push to 125, in-house counsel must weigh the specific facts and determine whether the company can defend that position before its regulator.
The risk, she argues, is incremental drift: each exception normalizes a slightly higher threshold until an organization has quietly moved from 125 to 150 without anyone registering the shift. Part of the in-house lawyer's function is to name that drift and reset – to hold the line at the specific number that was justified for a specific set of facts, and pull back when those facts no longer apply.
The sign that she was succeeding came when a departing colleague on the leadership team recently told her that he had never thought of her as "legal." "If I were at the beginning of my career, just called to the bar, I would say, ' Oh my God, I failed in my career," she says. Instead, "not being seen as a lawyer today – it's like wow, I did it – because it means that you've built a trust that they see you as … a business partner."
Building the function: ethical entrepreneurship at Organon
When Organon launched in 2021, the approach was not to start from scratch – Merck's lift-and-shift transferred operating procedures and all template agreements – but it was a great opportunity for Mayrand to ask whether policies, business practices still fit a leaner, more agile organization and its culture of empowerment. That process gave rise to what she calls "ethical entrepreneurship": doing the right thing, but faster.
Approachability was a founding goal Mayrand pursued. "When a new employee was joining Organon, I was picking up the phone and giving a call – hey, how are you? Just a coffee break," she says. The call did not make her a better lawyer, but it changed how the legal function was perceived across the organization.
She describes the in-house role as one function among many contributing to a shared outcome – "the arm of the octopus," as she puts it – alongside supply, government affairs and sales. "Because we have a wide enterprise view, I think our training gives us a 360 approach," she says, noting that this vantage point allows in-house counsel to contribute well beyond traditional legal matters, including initiatives like DEI and volunteering with industry associations.
AI, drug pricing, and the forces reshaping pharmaceutical law
As the sole lawyer in Organon Canada's commercial organization, Mayrand relies on AI for non-legal tasks: drafting and refining communications in French and English, summarizing complex documents, and applying project-management frameworks. Yet she is clear about the risks of over-relying on AI. "I think there's hallucination and confidentiality, but there's also intellectual passivity," she says. "I'm glad not to be at the beginning of my career, because I've learned how to think, I've learned how to criticize, I've learned how to exercise my judgment, which is the most important skill for an in-house counsel."
On the regulatory front, pharmaceutical in-house counsel are navigating a confluence of pressures. Drug pricing is the dominant policy question – where the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB) is heading in relation to the pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance (pCPA), which negotiates drug prices for provinces and territories, and how the US government's Most-Favoured-Nation (MFN) pricing policy will add cross-border complexity. Two significant IP decisions have also landed: the July 2026 Supreme Court of Canada ruling in Pharmascience Inc. v. Janssen Inc. on the patentability of methods of medical treatment, and the June 2026 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Hikma v. Amarin that narrowed generic skinny-label inducement liability. Tariff risk has moved up the agenda too, following US signals on generic drug imports and Canada's passage of related supply-chain legislation this year.
Her advice to lawyers considering the shift in-house is direct: shed the assumption that the workload lightens. "Don't think you go in-house to work less," she says. "You work a lot, but if you love being part of a team, this is very rewarding."
Most importantly, she advises lawyers to choose an employer whose values align with their own, because they are employees as well as professionals.