About

Team size: 13

Major legal advisers: CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang, Herbert Smith Freehills, Pinsent Masons

Chris Sawyer is recognised within BP as somebody who is on the path to the top and excited about energy transformation.

Based in Aberdeen, Sawyer is managing counsel for BP’s North Sea oil and gas business, which is handling as much business-as-usual work as it is adjusting to seismic shifts in the energy industry towards more carbon-neutral energy production.

In keeping with an increasing number of climate change initiatives across the industry, BP is exploring ways of reducing its carbon footprint for its onshore facilities in the North Sea, while also looking at options for the use of carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS), a form of energy production that renders the carbon emissions out of energy processes but has also attracted controversy among policymakers in the past for being costly to trial.

‘Ten years ago, when CCUS was first tried in the UK, the politics didn’t quite work, but business and society are now aligned on the need to drastically reduce emissions. BP publicly acknowledges this and its important role in addressing CO2 levels.’

BP is also on the cusp of new direction following the appointment of new chief executive Bernard Looney, formerly chief executive for upstream at BP, in February. He replaces Bob Dudley, who announced his retirement after nine years in the top position last October. In February, Looney said BP would work to become a net-zero company by 2050 or sooner.

Within the legal team itself, Sawyer has been trialling new working methods to help free up time for his lawyers to concentrate on personal development. The successful introduction of
agile working in BP’s upstream business is now being phased in across the BP legal function and North Sea.

‘Lawyers have traditionally been slow to explore agile or lean working methods to help manage change and workload prioritisation and shared learning. We’ve really embraced various tools like Kanban, value-stream mapping, Scrum and Kaizen to impressive effect.’