Carving out a role for legal with clean energy

It’s not often that in-house lawyers are given a clean slate to start a legal department from scratch, but that’s where Jennifer Manning, found herself when she agreed to join NRStor Inc. as vice-president and general counsel at the energy storage start up in 2014.

“When I started, there was nothing in place,” said Manning, who left a stable job at Infrastructure Ontario.

Manning was tasked with putting in place governance processes and procedures for a company in a fledgling industry that she knew little about — working with clean energy to build and develop energy storage technologies.

She said it has been a great experience trying to understand what her role and responsibilities are and carving out her own job.

She added that the projects are also technically challenging.

“We are trying to move the needle on an industry that is relatively new.”