Texas Lawbook: You have basically been a GC and in-house counsel for three decades. How has the role of in-house counsel changed during that time?
Janet Jamieson: The fundamentals really haven’t changed that much. At its core, the role of in-house counsel is to help facilitate the company’s ongoing business while mitigating its exposure to legal and regulatory risk. I’m a big proponent of what I like to call “preventative practice,” by which I mean being proactive in looking out for the interests of the company, whether by compliance programs, educating officers and employees or by structuring transactions and drafting agreements with a view to, among other things, ensuring clarity and anticipating what events could reasonably arise in the future and what their potential impact would be so to eliminate areas that could otherwise become ripe for dispute.
The biggest “change” over the course of my career is how much more accessible information and practice-related resources have become, first with the abundance of online resources, and more recently with AI. It used to be that to do a deep dive on a legal subject or to draft an atypical letter or contract, I’d often have to call a firm because they had the subject matter experts, associates to help and access to online tools I did not. Now, however, especially as online resources have become geared to in-house counsel as well to law firms, I can do a lot of that on my own. That said, while I know there is a lot of discussion regarding AI supplanting the legal profession, in my opinion there is nothing that can supplant the experience and judgment of an individual who has deep experience practicing law in a given area.
Lawbook: What do you find especially rewarding in your work at OCI?
Jamieson: I love working with the more junior attorneys in my department. They are great. I try not to be just a boss but rather a mentor and to share with them as much as I can of the benefit of my experience. One of the things I emphasize is making sure they always ask questions and get the big picture before trying to tackle a discrete issue. I also emphasize logic “trees” to ensure they think about and account for different scenarios. And we talk about materiality and how issues present different levels of risk in different contexts and how important it is to discuss and distinguish those differences with our business clients.
Lawbook: What are the critical factors you consider when deciding about hiring outside counsel and what are the biggest mistakes that outside counsel make in their relationship with in-house counsel?
Jamieson: On-point experience, depth, availability and cost are of course critical. It’s important for outside counsel to be proactive and keep me up to date. A big mistake can be when outside counsel “overstaffs.” For instance, if there is a partner and also one or two associates on a call, in-house counsel doesn’t want to be billed for all three if only the partner is necessary. Believe me, business clients also take note of that as they also don’t want to get tagged with unnecessarily high outside counsel bills. Another big mistake is not to meet established deadlines.
Lawbook: What does outside counsel need to know about you?
Jamieson: That I will ask lots of questions and want to be educated on the whys. I also look for outside counsel who will make practical recommendations based on their experience in their practice area, not just tell me the law and/or risks.
Lawbook: Given that your experience in-house in the energy industry spans almost three decades, what has been your experience of the representation of women you’ve encountered in leadership positions?
Jamieson: My personal experience is that I’ve spent the bulk of my career often being the only woman in executive-level meetings. More often than not, if there are other women there, they are also attorneys. I’d love to see more women ascend to other executive-level positions in the energy industry.