About

Primarily active in petroleum exploration and production, ConocoPhillips is one of the largest foreign operators on the Norwegian continental shelf. Amongst its 1,850 employees is the company’s legal department which is comprised of four lawyers, including managing counsel Tore Ulleberg who leads the team, and one paralegal. Ulleberg provides legal support to the management of the company, to the HSE organisation in addition to handling compliance issues and liaising with the firm’s corporate legal organisation. Senior counsel Elin Roedder Gundersen, another key figure in the team, supports all the Ekofisk offshore fields and ConocoPhillips’ UK Teesside terminal’s operational and commercial matters. In terms of the department’s other lawyers, Christer Valset supports capital projects, supply chain and partner operated organisations whilst Camilla Grytten supports the commercial organisation, several of partner-operated assets and the company’s technology and R&D organisation. In explaining the structure of the team, Ulleberg had the following to say: ‘As the legal team serves all aspects of ConocoPhillips Norway’s upstream oil and gas activities, we have assigned generic work areas, tasks and projects to each of the lawyers (myself included), with a back-up lawyer for each area. We endeavour to structure the legal team to avoid “silos”, to ensure all team members are exposed to, and hence gain experience in, the variety of legal challenges in our business value chain’. Demonstrating its international expertise, the most recent and significant transaction the legal team was involved in was to provide legal support to ConocoPhillips UK’s acquisition of an additional 11% interest in the UK Teesside Terminal which handles crude oil and natural gas liquids from offshore fields from the southern part of the Norwegian continental shelf, as well as several UK fields. Ulleberg also highlights that the team has overcome numerous challenges in the last two years related to cost, efficiency and innovation which arose from the global reduction in oil prices by finding ways to work smarter and more efficiently to reduce costs. In explaining the team’s ethos, he says: ’We strive for a supportive, learning and knowledge-sharing team culture enabling the team and its members to provide a superior quality, business-focused and cost effective legal support service’.