When Christina Ackermann came on board in August 2016, Bausch Health Companies Inc., formerly known as Valeant Pharmaceuticals, was a distressed, if not sinking, ship. She spent her first week with outside counsel studying a flood of legal and regulatory problems, and assessing the pharmaceutical company’s legal strengths and weaknesses.

Helping to right the ship has taught “me more in the last two years than I learned in the previous 15 at Novartis,” the veteran in-house counsel, who is executive vice president and general counsel, told Corporate Counsel in a recent interview. “Novartis is a fabulous company,” she added, “but the learning curve here, with the challenges we had, has just been, well, fun.”