About

Nigel Lowry is the current general counsel of Ausgrid, the electricity distribution company which owns, maintains and operates electrical networks supplying 1.7 million customers in Sydney, the Central Coast and Hunter Region. Lowry is pivotal to the efficient and successful operation of a number of different business functions within Ausgrid, and his remit encompasses legal, company secretarial, risk and compliance and internal audit functions. Since beginning his current role – which he started in 2017 – Lowry explains his central involvement in important business projects, namely the establishment of Ausgrid’s ‘inaugural AMTN, EMTN and 144A programs to refinance over $3.5bn AUD of existing debt’.

He is also ‘intimately involved’ in leading legal work streams and negotiations regarding the successful acquisition of Australia’s largest smart metering company, which Lowry states was in a ‘highly competitive bid process against a field of highly sophisticated and well-funded investors’. He has also been establishing a new unregulated business to invest in emerging energy solutions to further bolster his reputation as a deliverer. Lowry is also recognised for his managerial and organisational capabilities; having ‘revamped the legal engagement model to transform the legal team into a highly respected and effective business partner whilst also creating an efficient framework to identify and mitigate critical legal risks across the business’.

Such change also included rebalancing the legal team to ‘achieve the appropriate mix of skills and experience to better support the business’, and an overhaul of the management of external law firms, which he says has achieved ‘dramatic improvements in the effective engagement of our external legal advisors and legal spend’. Prior to his general counsel role at Ausgrid, Lowry spent almost a decade in private practice at King & Wood Mallesons as well as three years in London spent working at Slaughter & May and Linklaters. He subsequently assumed the position of associate director at Macquarie Group in 2008 where he remained for seven years, before becoming the senior legal counsel for CIMIC Group between 2015 and 2017. His top three in-house career highlights are as follows:

‘Establishing the legal function for a new and highly successful investment team at a major investment bank, leading the legal work streams on the successful investment of over $2bn AUD and successfully transforming the legal team of an organisation with an enterprise value of $20bn AUD in a period of intense organisational change and transactional activity’.