About

The highly experienced in-house legal team at STEP Energy Services is comprised of three experienced counsel; general counsel Joshua Kane, senior legal counsel Tereza Fonda and US legal counsel Nicole Larimore. Kane leads the legal functional group at STEP, and is responsible for providing commercial and strategic legal advice to management. In addition to general commercial advice, the team has a focus on corporate governance and policy development. Larimore also reports to the general counsel and provides a broad range of commercial legal support to STEP’s US subsidiary entities. In the last two years the department has grown and evolved to support the needs of a fast growing, and now publicly traded, energy services company operating in multiple jurisdictions. As an example of this growth, STEP has seen employment numbers rise from just over 700 professionals in January 2017 to over 1,600 by the end of 2018. STEP has also experienced other significant changes in the last two years, having been active from both a public markets and M&A perspective. In May 2017, STEP completed its initial public offering on the Toronto Stock Exchange. This was followed by a secondary offering of common shares later in the same year. In 2018, STEP announced what has been a transformational acquisition for the company; the acquisition of Tucker Energy Services in the US. In conjunction with that M&A transaction, STEP also completed an equity financing via subscription receipt offering and new credit facilities in order to help fund the acquisition of Tucker. Since working on this acquisition, the in-house legal team has also helped manage the successful integration of Tucker Energy Services into the STEP organisation. Kane highlights that, ‘the success of STEP’s legal team has been about people; both internal and external to STEP. By applying the same fit and talent criteria to our selection of external counsel, we’ve been able to find a fantastic group of counsel (in both Canada and the US) that have made significant contributions to the success of STEP’s legal team and our organisation’.