About

Chris Ryan joined EnergyAustralia in January 2015 as general counsel and company secretary. Currently a member of the executive management team of the business, Ryan is accountable for the legal and governance division, which comprises of around 30 professionals within legal, company secretariat and regulatory compliance teams. Previously, Ryan was general counsel for the Shell Australia group of companies in Melbourne, having held a range of legal, managerial and director positions with the Royal Dutch Shell Group in Melbourne, Perth, London, The Hague and Singapore during a 19 year career with Shell. Since joining EnergyAustralia, Ryan has taken the opportunity to bring in people with retail skills and experience, especially in consumer law, as that was not an area of depth for the company and a revised strategy in 2015 specifically called for EnergyAustralia to become a better retailer. He has worked to instil a culture in the team of choosing how best to spend their time for the good of EnergyAustralia overall and encourage the team to spend time thinking of and putting in place ways that help colleagues achieve their aims with less input from the legal team for lower risk matters. Ryan explains: ‘For example, an internal client recently asked me to recruit a new lawyer to support an activity that was important to his KPIs for the next year or so. I knew that for his work he really didn’t need legal input so much as commercial and administrative support. We, legal, sponsored a workshop that set the exam question: “What does it take for you to win in this business?” The idea was to reframe the discussion and help the realisation that more legal support was unlikely to help him move faster and win more business’. Ryan enjoys finding opportunities to step outside of his legal role and learn other skills within the business, and in 2017 was the acting chief customer officer for approximately one month, looking after the sales and marketing business unit while the CCO was on leave, and in 2018 he had a similar opportunity within the customer experience division, which handles billing and contact centres.

From these experiences he has a far greater appreciation of the challenges of running a profit and loss centre for areas with hundreds of employees and putting risk based decision making in perspective. Ryan is aware that in order to be relevant, legal advice needs to be capable of application in that context. Ryan identifies that he is motivated by the importance of legal regulation in the energy industry, and the role that in-house counsels play in its application and the company’s decision making process. He says, ‘it is not many people who get to play a role in this fundamental transition of our energy system, and I like to think that I might play a small part in making it better so that people can once again take energy for granted’.