Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
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10 www.canadianlawyermag.com/inhouse GC PROFILE GROWING UP IN a rural farming community in Saskatchewan and attending the University of Saskatchewan, Noralee Bradley felt that her career had come full circle when she was offered a role at Saskatoon-based Canadian fertilizer giant, Nutrien. With 30 years of private practice experience under her belt in positions at the Calgary offices of Blakes Cassels & Graydon LLP, Osler Hoskin & Harcourt and Bennett Jones LLP, Bradley joined the global company as executive vice president and chief legal officer in March 2020 — her first foray into an in-house counsel role. As a member of the executive team, Bradley contributes to strategic decisions for Nutrien, a global producer and distributor of potash, nitrogen and phosphate products for agriculture, industrial and feed customers. As chief legal officer, she also leads the legal function, consisting of a 60-person global legal team, with representatives in Canada, the US, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Trinidad and Belgium. Joining Nutrien at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bradley immediately started in crisis mode. "I was not only getting integrated into the company but also thrown right into making some of those very strategic decisions very quickly," says Bradley. "Given our purpose of growing the world from the ground up and supporting food supply, we were very focused on keeping our facilities and operations going, and also keeping our employees safe and informed because there was a lot of uncertainty." As an essential service, business continued throughout the pandemic, but Bradley and her team rapidly implemented safety restrictions on operations and moved corporate functions to remote work. In addition, Nutrien quickly established a COVID task force which included operational support from all areas of the business. As part of that task force, Bradley's legal team collaborated with functions including HR, health and safety and the environment group to think about ways to keep operations going and employees safe. "We also had to consider all the different geographies which were dealing with different regulations from their governments and different circumstances in terms of how fast the virus was spreading," says Bradley. Nutrien employs over 23,000 people and has operations and investments in 13 countries around the world. Returning to her roots to manage a crisis Noralee Bradley came back to Saskatchewan to support global food supply and ESG priorities at Nutrien "Given our purpose of growing the world from the ground up and supporting food supply, we were very focused on keeping our facilities and operations going, and also keeping our employees safe and informed."