Lexpert magazine features articles and columns on developments in legal practice management, deals and lawsuits of interest in Canada, the law and business issues of interest to legal professionals and businesses that purchase legal services.
Issue link: https://digital.carswellmedia.com/i/1547047
50 www.canadianlawyermag.com FEATURE INHOUSE INTERVIEWS BUILDING CENOVUS' GLOBAL COMPLIANCE PROGRAM – AND THE VALUE OF CURIOSITY Curiosity, more than legal expertise on its own, is what gets Sherry Wendt through the most complicated parts of her job. As vice president, legal and chief compliance officer at Cenovus Energy, Wendt oversees a compliance mandate that spans Canada, the United States, and Asia-Pacific – a multi-jurisdictional footprint the Calgary-based energy company inherited almost overnight after its combination with Husky Energy, which closed in January 2021. "It's a labyrinth of complexity when you're operating in multiple jurisdictions," she says. Wendt's path to her current mandate began in private practice. She joined Bennett Jones LLP as an associate in the firm's energy and banking groups, working primarily on energy and banking deals during what she calls "a deal heyday in the oil patch." That experience led to an opportunity at Penn West, where she became the first lawyer hired by the company's newly appointed general counsel. By her own account, the biggest leap in her career was a move from a director role in the legal department to director – and eventually vice president – of investor relations. Her CFO at the time told her that explaining the company's story to investors required a different depth of understanding than simply meeting disclosure obligations: "The level of understanding of the business that you require to explain it to someone else is completely different." "In a company of this size and age, it's not often that you get an opportunity to build a new space in the company," she says. Reconciling requirements that don't always align between jurisdictions has become a defining part of the role. "I find it fun. It's like a puzzle. I love that about it." Wendt returns to curiosity when asked what advice she would give lawyers stepping into similarly complex in-house roles. "Ask the questions of your colleagues in legal, but more importantly, ask the questions of your peers across the business," she says. MELISSA REITER Company: Jobber Title: General counsel and senior director SCALING JOBBER'S LEGAL FUNCTION FOR AI – FROM ONE LAWYER TO FOUR "The process of building Jobber's legal function required getting to know the business and designing a unique and customized roadmap based on how we do business here," says Melissa Reiter, general counsel and senior director at Jobber, the Edmonton-based field service management platform. "And that roadmap is still changing." Reiter joined Jobber in January 2022 as the company's first in-house lawyer. Since then, the company has grown from roughly 400 employees to 1,200, with its platform now serving more than 100,000 businesses and 400,000 service professionals across 60 countries. Services invoiced through the platform have surpassed $100 billion. Her legal team has grown from one lawyer to four. Reiter is precise about how she frames AI's role. "We've seen it as something that we are layering on top of processes … we can empower teams to change their workflows … to make it an innovation partner and not just a replacement for something that exists, but an accelerator," she says. The clearest example of this shift for Jobber is NDA processing. One member of Reiter's team took on a legal operations mandate and built an automated workflow using tools already available across the company, connecting systems to pull data from spreadsheets directly into template documents. NDA turnaround time dropped from 24 hours to 5–10 minutes. "That's been a significant gain in terms of speed and flexibility, especially for a task that we get quite frequently," Reiter says. The most underrated skill for general counsel in a crisis is composure. "Being the calmest person in the room tends to be helpful, and I find that calm is contagious," she says. "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast." "Focusing on practicality and efficiency and the execution of your risk-management strategies is really key in this type of environment, and not getting too stuck on how you did things in the past, or how you are currently doing things," Reiter says. SHERRY WENDT Company: Cenovus Energy Title: Vice president, legal & chief compliance officer