About

Audrey Marie O’Sullivan, general counsel of legal, compliance and risk at SIRO, began her career in private practice at McCann FitzGerald in Dublin. Dual qualified in Ireland and England and Wales, O’Sullivan is a specialist corporate and commercial lawyer which has included building legal practice expertise in a number of areas of law. These include employment law, e-commerce law, procurement, data protection, technology and major corporate commercial transactions and associated litigation. She worked at BT for many years, and more recently, has worked in the financial services sector in London for Worldpay, a global payments company. She has been in her current general counsel role at SIRO for four years and was made legal director in January 2019, with the extended responsibilities of covering compliance and risk. SIRO is a joint venture company, 50% owned by Vodafone, and 50% owned by Irish public utility company ESB. SIRO is engaged in building a new fibre-optic technology network using part of the country’s existing electricity network, for high speed broadband, and O’Sullivan helped establish SIRO’s legal function from scratch. This required building up systems, processes and templates and applying controls, as well as hiring staff to provide effective legal support to a company building a new telecoms infrastructure in Ireland using the existing electricity utility infrastructure. O’Sullivan highlights that ‘there was no legal function in the start-up joint venture company, prior to me taking up the role. Accordingly, it was necessary to create and develop effective systems, processes practices and controls, for a functioning legal department. Since the early days, and now with responsibility for compliance and risk, I have, among other things, sought to streamline the corporate risk management assessment process (for identifying key corporate risks) and providing easy risk reporting tools for business peers and the SIRO board’. In the past three years, O’Sullivan has been involved in major corporate transactions between the company and its major customers: Vodafone, Sky, BT, Huawei, French business Axione-Bouygues and Obelisk Communications. Advising aspiring and current in-house counsel, O’Sullivan explains, ‘how vital it is as a lawyer, to stay up-to-date in your practice area; to use simple tools and templates (for efficiency) and importantly to stay connected to your key legal and professional networks’.