Keith Abrams – Bayer

When Keith Abrams earned his undergraduate degree in accounting, he already knew the profession wasn’t his end goal.

Keith Abrams | Bayer | VP & Associate General Counsel

“I had gone into accounting, deciding I wanted to be a lawyer,” he explains.

For him, accounting wasn’t a fallback—it was a tool to better understand how companies work, make money, and manage their risk. That foundation, paired with a law degree from the University of Chicago, positioned Abrams for a career spent at the intersection of law, governance, and business.

His first steps were unusual for a graduate of Chicago Law. Instead of joining a large law firm, Abrams went in-house at Continental Illinois National Bank. It was a time of upheaval: the bank had just been taken over by the FDIC, becoming subject to a layer of federal oversight the rest of the banking industry hadn’t yet faced. Abrams found himself in the corporate secretarial function that helped run the bank, guiding it through federal receivership, and eventually bringing it private again.

From there, Abrams moved into private practice, spending 12 more years representing small to mid-sized businesses in financing transactions, reorganizations, and mergers and acquisitions. Yet he never lost sight of the fact that his strengths lay in guiding organizations through complexity. In 1999, Bayer offered him that chance, and for the next 26 years, he would become a central figure in the company’s U.S. operations.

Governance at the core

Bayer is a global enterprise with core competencies in the life science fields of healthcare and nutrition. Its mission is to design products and services that serve the most essential human needs while addressing the challenges of a growing and aging global population. Through science and innovation, Bayer works to advance life for all—by reimagining how we care for ourselves, improving patient care, and finding new ways to nourish communities worldwide.

At Bayer, Abrams became not just a legal counsel but a steward of governance.

“Among the things I’ve done is help start our policy committee and compliance program in the U.S., and make sure our legal entities are structured in a way that facilitates good governance by the business as opposed to legal,” he recalls.

Over time, he helped transform Bayer’s governance function into a center of expertise, a hub that supports operations across all U.S. businesses and platform functions.

He likened his team to the “heart and lungs of the organization.” They are not front and center in the businesses, but integral to their running smoothly. The team keeps corporate records, implements company-wide programs, and guides management through specialized legal topics and multi-faceted transactions. In his words, governance isn’t just about following rules—it assures our “license to operate.”

Under Abrams’ guidance, compliance became a cultural value, not a box to check.

“We wanted compliance to fit in the same place as safety,” he says. “You want to feel like what you’re doing is always right.”

His team worked to make compliance intuitive and accessible, offering resources and instilling a “speak up” culture that encouraged employees to raise concerns without fear.

Preparing the next generation

For Abrams, leadership was never about holding on to power. “As a leader, I wanted everyone on my team to maximize their personal development so they could step in and do things when I wasn’t there,” he says. That mindset shaped his approach to succession planning long before his retirement was on the horizon.

He built redundancy into his department by encouraging every attorney to have both a specialty area where they were the “A-team” and a broader practice area where they could assist if needed. This not only kept the department agile but also made his lawyers more well-rounded.

To identify and nurture talent, Abrams created a development program for high-potential lawyers, using simulations of real-life scenarios. Participants received immediate feedback from observer teams and developed personalized growth plans. The program focused less on technical legal skills and more on softer traits, such as the courage to speak up and not back down in difficult situations.

Mentorship, for Abrams, was an experiential process.

“Mentoring isn’t telling people what to do but working through issues as an equal and accomplishing tasks together,” he explains.

He often rewrote documents alongside younger lawyers or walked them through the intricacies of navigating a particular topic, such as managing a board of directors.

“You don’t necessarily know how to do something until you’ve done it often enough, as I have,” he adds. “This hands-on style meant the team absorbed knowledge more quickly and felt supported.”

When the time for retirement came, Abrams staged his exit deliberately. He pushed back his final day a few times to help complete projects only he could handle, while ensuring the team was ready to take on everything else. He even tested the waters by stepping away for two months during a medical leave.

“Everything went swimmingly,” he says.

When he returned, the team didn’t need him to step back in, a reassuring sign that his preparation had paid off.

By the time his retirement party arrived, Abrams was confident his team wouldn’t miss a beat.

A legacy of steady leadership

After more than 40 years in law—nearly 15 in private practice and over 26 at Bayer—Abrams is modest about his contributions, describing himself as straightforward, logical, and even-keeled. Still, the legacy he leaves is anything but. He built a culture of governance and compliance that continues to guide Bayer’s U.S. operations. He challenged lawyers to be not only specialists but adaptable generalists, ready to handle the unexpected. He instilled in his team the importance of adding value, not just doing work.

Looking back, Abrams frames his leadership in terms of balance. He describes his philosophy as keeping life and work within the bell curve—not at the extremes, but in a zone of responsibility and predictability. That approach made him a steadying force in a company that faced constant challenges and change.

Though retired, Abrams remains open to lending his governance expertise through board roles, consulting or nonprofit work. What he misses most is problem-solving—“the objective to achieve, how do we achieve it to optimize the outcome.” Yet he’s content knowing he left Bayer in strong hands.

His career underscores a larger truth: leadership isn’t about what you achieve alone, but about how you prepare others to carry on once you’re gone.

“Part of what I looked at, especially within a large and well-established company, is you don’t want to stand in the way of the next generation,” Abrams says.

In stepping aside, he has done exactly that—he has cleared the path for them to thrive.