Lim Hai Bee co-founded Cat and Pillar and serves as Senior IP Manager, having established the firm's vision and mission alongside Yan Shao from its earliest days: to make quality trademark prosecution accessible to every business, rather than only those able to afford a traditional law firm.
Hai Bee's path into trademark practice was not conventional. She began her career teaching Physics and Mathematics at the secondary school level, before moving into brand merchandising at Seager Inc., where she liaised with brand principals on the procurement of travel and lifestyle products for retail and distribution channels. This role provided direct, practical exposure to brand licensing and franchising arrangements, distribution agreements, and the concerns faced by international brand principals expanding into new countries — exposure that proved directly relevant to trademark work well before it became her profession.
Hai Bee learned trademark search, assessment, and prosecution directly from Yan Shao, and has since developed a particular strength in identifying abstract trademark concepts quickly and applying them precisely to the facts of each case, an instinct she attributes in part to her teaching background.
This capacity for structure is most evident in her work developing the firm's internal systems. Unlike much of the trademark industry, Hai Bee did not join Cat and Pillar with an existing set of procedures inherited from a law firm; she built the firm's procedures from first principles, which is why they correspond closely to client needs rather than to a process carried over from elsewhere. Hai Bee led Cat and Pillar's migration to FoundationIP, overseeing the transition and verifying that years of case data transferred accurately. She continues to train the wider team on the use of the system, including the recording of new cases, the updating of case status, and the setting of deadlines, and built the firm's internal system for tracking every case and its status, which the team continues to rely on.
Every matter handled by Cat and Pillar is reviewed by one of two people prior to proceeding: Yan Shao or Hai Bee, a final review reserved for the two who established the firm's standards from its earliest days.
Hai Bee's interests outside of work include hiking, drawing, and reading.