About

Charlene Ripley, general counsel for Goldcorp, boasts 25 years’ experience in the field of corporate law. Ripley has an impressive list of achievements that includes building LINN Energy through numerous acquisitions ranging from several hundred million dollars to over $15bn in market cap, completed in just over five years with the company. Among her biggest corporate highlights Ripley lists managing Anadarko’s 2006 acquisition of Kerr-McGee and Western Gas Resources. These were two separate public company acquisitions totalling over $21bn that were announced on the same day. Managing through the 2008 market crisis proved particularly hard, and Ripley had to make sure that the compliance function remained fit for purpose. ‘Keeping on top of all relevant information and making sure that my management team and board were fully aware of pending regulatory and compliance changes. Also ensuring the companies I worked at have appropriate risk management systems’. Ripley takes pride in her talent in being able to successfully restructure the legal teams she has worked with. Some of the change she is particularly proud of is when she strengthened the communication between legal team members, using quarterly team calls, yearly and strategy sessions; increased level of oversight and management of legal costs and moved away from practice of non-lawyers retaining outside counsel without in-house counsel’s involvement.