About

Bord Gáis Energy provides gas and electricity to over 680,000 customers in Ireland. Joanne Ross, head of legal and regulation, has been with the company since 2011. She describes that she has been able to create and sculpt the legal function throughout her time in her current role, as the internal legal function was not well established upon her joining. ‘When I joined Bord Gais Energy it was just being set up as a separate business division in Bord Gais Eireann so I got the opportunity to build a really strong internal legal team and to define, with the team, what we thought was the best model to use to support our business. I did a lot of work to make sure the team understands the business inside and out, centralised the appointment and management of all external lawyers, and put a lot of effort into engaging with the key people our business on what the legal function’s role is and how we will work together’. In 2014 she got the opportunity to play a key role in the restructuring of the Bord Gais Energy which enabled its privatisation and sale to a consortium of three buyers. Ross remained with the supply side of the business, which was acquired by Centrica plc and has since played a key role in the integration process. She feels that in order to provide the most effective legal advice possible to their clients, ‘law firms could do more thinking on how to deliver certain sorts of services more cost effectively. With discovery and due diligence, for instance, you can spend very significant amounts of money and it can be difficult to justify the cost as the value add is not always very tangible’. As well as this, she believes private practice firms are now ‘less likely to give secondees to in-house teams, which is a shame as these can be the best way to deal with short term capacity issues for the client and can provide really good client insight and experience to the secondees themselves which I think is a valuable development opportunity’.