About

Editor’s note: This interview was conducted prior to March 2020.

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

In 2018, STEP Energy Services completed what has become a transformational transaction for us: The acquisition of Tucker Energy Services in the US. In conjunction with that M&A transaction, STEP completed a Hart–Scott–Rodino filing, closed an equity financing and entered into new credit facilities in order to help fund the acquisition. Since acquiring Tucker, STEP’s legal team has worked with our business professionals to manage the successful integration of Tucker Energy Services into the STEP organisation.

In 2019, the oil and gas service industry saw challenging market conditions. As a result, STEP has been focused on securing new clients, larger strategic work programmes, and negotiating and contracting with suppliers for input cost reductions. Consequently, the focus of STEP’s legal department was the significant number of client and vendor agreements needed to support those organisational goals. Managing a high volume of work at a reasonable cost has been a key achievement for STEP’s legal department in this challenging industry environment. STEP also completed three separate amendments to its syndicated credit facilities in 2019 which, among other things, provided for increased financial flexibility, the inclusion of an equity cure provision, expansion of its US operating facility to accommodate growth in US operations, and extended the maturity date of the facility.

How do you feel in-house legal leaders can successfully introduce and implement a culture within a legal department?

For me it comes down to open communication and freedom to achieve goals. The members of my team are talented individuals who were hired not just because of their learned skills, but also for their personalities. By communicating openly within the team, everyone is aware of what needs to be achieved and that this achievement must come while adhering to the corporation’s core values. From there, your team is free to practice their skills and be themselves doing it. I find this lets team members feel respected for their skills, avoids micromanagement, and allows people to feel comfortable asking questions (and for help) in order to grow their skill base.

If you had to give advice to an aspiring in-house lawyer or general counsel what would it be and why?

First, people really matter. I’ve come to realise that what you work on is important, but who you work with is the real key to job satisfaction. So find passionate, talented, people to work with and give them the opportunity and freedom to do what they’re good at. To use an analogy: If you’re a talented sandcastle builder you can build sandcastles anywhere, but whether you actually enjoy building them usually comes down to who you’re sitting with in the sandbox on that long day in the sun. Second, be careful not to hire yourself. The best teams I’ve worked with come with a diversity of experience and skills. By hiring people who compliment your skillset, rather than simply replicating it, means the team as a whole can provide a better service to your client. This also helps ensure a diverse workplace culture.

FOCUS ON: TECHNOLOGY

I believe that an interest in technology, and a willingness to adopt it, is becoming key to the success of a general counsel and their in-house team. Technologies such as contract automation, contract management, automated reporting, and even artificial intelligence (AI) based contract review systems can be of significant benefit. They allow many of the time consuming administrative functions of running the department to be automated, leaving more time for the general counsel and his or her team to spend solving real legal questions (or just as important, saving them money by reducing the amount of work that needs to be sent to external counsel). Technology can also be a key contributor to employee satisfaction. Highly skilled legal counsel typically prefer to spend their time doing interesting legal work, and the less administrative burden you place on them the better. You get better employee engagement, and less chance for administrative error, by automating processes that might otherwise be considered mundane; leaving your team to focus on solving interesting legal problems.

At STEP Energy Services, we’ve implemented an AI based contract management software, which automatically collects and summarises key contract terms and allows for immediate, dashboard like, reporting on the agreements we have in place. This database gives our legal team easy (text searchable) access to the contracts and also allows for automatic reminders of key dates. The benefits of having faster search times, near instant reporting capabilities, and a ‘one stop’ place to access documents have been innumerable. The second phase of STEP’s technology adoption has been contract automation. We’ve seen significant time savings by automating our confidentiality agreement process. A plain language questionnaire allows individuals to self-serve their contract needs, while still allowing the auto-generated product to be referred to STEP’s in-house for review in pre-stipulated circumstances. Following our success with confidentiality agreements, we intend to roll out the software to STEP’s supply chain group for their day-to-day contracting needs; with a goal of (i) significantly reducing contract turnaround times and (ii) easing the administrative burden (for legal and our supply chain group) in high-volume contracting situations. Overall, our experience with new technology at STEP Energy Services has been a very positive one. I highly recommend anyone who is still sitting on the fence to have a second look at some of the new offerings in the marketplace – you and your legal team will appreciate it.