Ratika Gandhi was not looking for an in-house role when a recruiter called. Now she oversees legal and compliance for Alcon across Canada and Latin America.
At Alcon, that life is defined by one particular tension: the law struggles to keep pace with rapidly advancing technology. Nowhere is that gap more visible than in privacy and artificial intelligence, where personal health information is involved, and the regulatory environment is still behind. Alcon has responded to the uncertainty by structuring the company with a dedicated privacy function, regional privacy officers embedded across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia, and an internal AI committee that weighs new initiatives before they advance. With those changes, Gandhi's role has expanded to encompass evolving privacy and AI considerations across all markets under her responsibility.
That balance – protecting the business without becoming an obstacle – is the animating idea behind her approach to the function.
From McMillan to multinational
Gandhi's path to that role began at McMillan LLP's business law group, where she focused on mergers and acquisitions while expanding into health law, privacy, and regulation. Private practice, she says, gave her "a great opportunity to get exposure, especially as a business lawyer, to many different types of businesses," and sharpened her interest in how healthcare is delivered and regulated.
She was not seeking an in-house position when a recruiter approached her, and recalls feeling reluctant to leave a firm she valued, particularly for its professional development culture. What shifted was the mandate and scale she saw at Alcon. During interviews, she was drawn to the company's stated purpose – helping people see brilliantly – and by a footprint spanning more than 130 markets. She also made clear she was not interested in replicating firm life inside a corporation; she wanted to be close to decision-making and the business itself.
That promise materialized quickly. Gandhi joined as director of legal and compliance; within months, leadership changes created a vacancy at the top. She was confirmed as head of legal and compliance within her first year.
A product mix that makes regulation unavoidable
Her mandate has since widened to cover Latin America alongside Canada – markets where the business model and risk profile differ sharply. When Gandhi joined, Alcon was still part of Novartis; it later spun off as an independent eye care company. Alcon’s surgical business is one of the company’s core franchises, focused on ophthalmic surgical products and technologies used by eye care professionals to treat conditions such as cataracts, retinal disorders, and refractive errors. Its vision care business focuses on everyday vision correction and ocular health management, including contact lenses and other ocular health products. The company also has a pharmaceutical business in the US and Latin America. The company works directly in 56 countries and serves consumers and patients in over 140 countries and territories.
That product mix makes regulation impossible to treat as an afterthought. Gandhi's work spans regulatory authorizations, product launches, and interactions with customers who are themselves regulated, such as ophthalmologists and optometrists. Distinct rules apply to drugs, devices, and even sampling. As she moved up, the focus shifted to competition risk, fraud and abuse concerns, and distributor oversight in Latin America.
Risk as a shared obligation
If the temptation in a heavily regulated sector is to treat legal as the risk owner of last resort, Gandhi resists it. The company sees risk as a shared obligation, a message Gandhi is now pushing across her region. Her goal is to position her group as a strategic asset, not a gatekeeper that surfaces only at the end of a process. That requires coaching her lawyers "to be that business partner that's not just the checkbox, but more someone that the business comes to early on to help think about options and understand the business objective and then the way to get there," operating within clear guardrails.
Outside counsel still plays a role, but Gandhi is deliberate about when and how she uses them. Her in-house team is lean, so she calls in firms for niche expertise and to handle capacity spikes. The firms that stand out, she says, are those "that know my business really well and know the types of issues that I'm thinking about and also my risk profile." These firms proactively flag developments or offer primers for the business rather than circulating generic client bulletins. Cost pressure is constant, she adds, and she expects serious conversations about fixed or alternative fee models rather than open-ended hourly billing.
What lawyers considering in-house roles should know
Gandhi's advice to lawyers eyeing similar roles is to start by asking why they want to move at all, because "once you go in-house, you're opening yourself up to be more of a generalist." They should also abandon assumptions about pace. "Sometimes people think that going in-house means it's a nine-to-five job. It's not," she says. The reality inside a bank, a small entrepreneurial business, or a multinational medical device company like Alcon is very different.
What keeps Gandhi in healthcare, she says, is that the work is genuinely meaningful and directly tied to improving people's lives, while demanding that lawyers wrestle with complicated, high-stakes problems rather than “just making widgets.” Treating legal as a strategic asset rather than a box-ticking hurdle, she argues, enables a healthcare company to innovate without losing the trust it depends on.