About

Joanne Ross began her career at McCann FitzGerald in 1999 completing a training contract and then
worked for three years PQE in M&A and private equity before relocating to Belfast. She began her in-house career at Lagan Technologies from 2005 to 2009 as general counsel and company secretary, before moving to
Coca-Cola Hellenic from 2009 to 2011 as legal director for The Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Since 2011, Ross has been head of legal and regulatory affairs of Bord Gáis Energy, Centrica Group and has been a director on the board of BGE since 2015. Ross played a key role in the privatisation of BGE and sale to Centrica. She highlights that, this was an ‘extremely challenging time in my career and I learnt a lot about how to lead a team of people, most of whom did not work directly for me, to go “above and beyond” during a time of great uncertainty. I have also played a key role in post completion integration with Centrica Group’. Over her time at BGE she has made many significant changes, including centralising the budget for all external spend and ensuring that only the in-house team can instruct external counsel; significantly building up in-house capability and reducing dependence on external support; and streamlining how the team advise the business so that its clear across the legal, regulatory, compliance and data governance sub-teams. She has also led the training of business colleagues to take responsibility for some “lower value” activities that the legal team would have done previously, for example, standard contracts, NDAs, advice on delegations of authority. She has facilitated more active communication with the wider company on how to mitigate key risks and furthered communication across the wider Centrica Group. For example, she adds that, ‘we have communications plan to continuously remind people in the business of the importance of protecting personal data and complying with GDPR’. She has also worked to ensure accountability for compliance is understood as resting with the business, as opposed to with the legal or compliance teams. For example, her team has written an accountability framework which identifies, by name, who is accountable for complying with each of its regulatory licence obligations. Furthermore, she highlights that she has ‘sponsored and been very actively involved in developing BGEs extensive support programme for mental health. The programme aims to reduce stigma and provide support for our staff through various support mechanisms we have built up over the past few years including a network of trained mental health champions, professional support services and various wellbeing initiatives and talks run throughout the year’.