Rima Pancholi (Corporate IP, 2016-2019), assistant general counsel at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, practiced in the firm’s Corporate Department. Rima received her B.A. from Cornell University and her J.D. from Fordham University, School of Law.

1. What’s the most interesting and/or rewarding aspect of your role as assistant general counsel at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?

The most interesting part of my role as assistant general counsel at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the opportunity to learn about the inequities in global health systems. The problems the foundation and its partners address lie at the nexus of global poverty, gender equality, malnutrition, infectious disease, and rapidly advancing technologies in biomedicine and genetics. These generate incredibly complex questions around intellectual property, global access, pricing models to incentivize innovation and imagination as to what might be made possible tomorrow.

To be the legal arm of this work is incredibly rewarding. Given the mandate of helping all people to lead healthy and productive lives, each team hosts pathbreaking scientists, dedicated program officers, and a whole host of other imaginative and innovative experts. Working alongside them, I try to ensure that the next wave of discoveries—like genomic technologies—that might otherwise be reserved for the most privileged people in the world, will make it to the most remote and most vulnerable among us.

2. What is the most challenging aspect of your role?

The most challenging part of my job is to help balance the interests of all parties in a deal. While our objective is to secure access to invaluable treatments for people who don't have the access or means to purchase them on their own, the successful development and commercialization of those treatments must be supported. Similarly, the Foundation would be unsuccessful in reaching those in need if we fail to navigate nuanced and complex sociopolitical landscapes with grace. While at Paul, Weiss, I learned from incredible mentors how to see the whole chess board in order to do exactly that. I learned that deals of global scale and importance rarely affect (or are determined by) a single issue and that their consequences may not be seen until much later. I find it very satisfying to challenge myself to ensure my teams are driving towards sustainable solutions and continue to succeed long after I'm no longer directly involved.

3. What advice would you give to a lawyer who wants to work in the nonprofit space?

There is a lot of rhetoric about how lawyering for a for-profit/law firm is very different from lawyering for a charitable organization, and how shifting from the for-profit/firm to a charitable organization is like “starting over.” While there are distinctions between the two, like risk tolerances and “bottom lines,” the core skills of being able to identify risks and issues, understand them, calibrate them and advise clients so that they can make an informed decision is very much the same. I use these parts of my Paul, Weiss transactional training every day. My advice to a lawyer who wants to work in the nonprofit space is that they should focus on honing those critical skills and their lawyers’ intuition.