“I thought it would be slow. I thought it would be boring. I was wrong.” That’s how Monic Pratch at FortisBC describes her leap from private practice to in-house counsel. She never planned on this path. She never imagined the sheer scope of influence she’d have.
Unlike private practice, where lawyers “see a file when there's a legal issue, or when something is about to arise,” Pratch says in-house counsel are there “long before it ever became a contract, long before it became a transaction… and really have the opportunity at the very beginning to shape the idea.” She’s blunt about the stakes: “For better or worse, you get to live with it.”
Pratch’s move to FortisBC was a fluke. She and her husband, both lawyers, wanted a life closer to the mountains. She applied across the Okanagan and her resume landed at FortisBC, which needed her background in utility land acquisition. “It wasn't on purpose, but it was a happy accident,” she says.
She expected the utility sector to be tedious. Instead, she found constant change. “I've had a title change or an opportunity to work in a new position every two or three years… It's been the exact opposite of slow or boring. I actually think I work more hours in-house than I did in private practice. And not because I'm forced to, but because I really love it and I'm interested in the work,” she says.
Since joining FortisBC’s legal department in 2010, Pratch has held roles as senior counsel, privacy officer, corporate secretary, and director of governance and corporate compliance. Now, as vice president, general counsel, corporate secretary and sustainability, she oversees legal, lands, environment, sustainability, privacy, internal audit, enterprise risk management, insurance, and corporate compliance. She’s also corporate secretary for FortisBC’s two venture issuers and several other companies.
She credits FortisBC’s culture for her rapid rise. “Fortis is the company that's never said no. If you're interested in something and you want to work on it, they're more than happy to find the work and let you work in those areas. And so they've really supported my career journey, even when it was things outside of law that I was interested in,” she says.
Managing a sprawling team, Pratch adapts her approach for each director. “It's not a balance of equal time. It's really a balance of really understanding what they need,” she says.
The legal department’s reach is broad – environmental law, Indigenous reconciliation, and more. FortisBC’s early adoption of a statement of Indigenous principles and pioneering Indigenous-led environmental assessments set it apart. “For over 25 years, we've been following those,” she says. The company’s partnerships with First Nations run deep, touching every major project and shaping daily operations.
Sustainability is another front. Pratch notes the Competition Bureau’s new greenwashing legislation but says it hasn’t shifted FortisBC’s compliance mindset. “The greenwashing provisions [haven’t] changed the underlying obligation for organizations to back up and be able to support what they're saying from a sustainability perspective,” she says. The real challenge? Navigating a maze of regulatory, policy, and market changes across multiple jurisdictions.
Governance at FortisBC is defined by its relationship with parent company Fortis Inc. The decentralized model gives each subsidiary substantial autonomy with majority independent board members and independent chairs. “It's a unique governance model… but it is something that we're very proud of and that works very, very well from our perspective,” she says.
External counsel play a long game at FortisBC. “Some of those firms, two of them, we've had relationships for over 30 years, and in one case over 40 years. And so when you think about the way that they can learn our business and provide that type of advice, over time, it becomes incredibly important and incredibly valuable to us,” she says. Her advice to law firms is direct: “It's really know your client, understand your client and right-size the advice. I don't always need a 30-page memo on a topic. I might just need a phone call with someone to do a gut check,” she says.
For lawyers eyeing an in-house move, Pratch doesn’t sugarcoat it. “Give it a chance, because you may not realize what you're missing.” She never set out to become general counsel or to chase an in-house role. Her career, she says, “ebbed and flowed all the way through the organization in different areas. And here I sit, with the opportunity to work with 11 incredibly talented in-house lawyers and an amazing team beyond that.” The unpredictability, she insists, is the point. “Just be open to where that career path might lead you,” she says.
FortisBC is a Canadian-owned company based in British Columbia. Its more than 2,700 employees deliver natural gas, electricity and propane and continue to acquire renewable and lower carbon energy, including natural gas designated as Renewable Natural Gas. It serves nearly 1.3 million customers across the province, including 135 cities and towns, and 58 First Nations communities across 150 Traditional Territories.