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 & 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 that way when you’re operating in multiple jurisdictions,” she says. “And obviously that gets really interesting when you’re operating in the US, Canada, Asia.”
From private practice to Penn West’s first legal department
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. Until then, Penn West had operated for roughly 20 years without a legal department. She took on corporate secretarial duties she had never handled before, learning the role under the mentorship of outside counsel who had previously performed the function. The direct exposure to the board of directors and C-suite that came with it, she says, was a “really compelling” driver for her move to the role at Penn West – access she might not have had inside a larger department at that stage of her career.
Joining Cenovus and the leap into investor relations
A posting for a role at Cenovus arrived by chance, sent by a friend while Wendt was consumed by a financial restatement at Penn West. The fit with her corporate governance and transactional background felt so exact, she jokes, that “it might as well have just said we are looking for Sherry Wendt.” She had long admired the company’s reputation for governance, having used its precedents in private practice, met its general counsel at a conference, and often heard the firm’s senior lawyers spoken of highly. That reputation held up once she joined. “There were so many really, really smart people that were the best at what they did in various spaces,” she says of her early years at the company.
In 2018, Wendt was recognized as a Lexpert Rising Star, and, by her own account, the biggest leap in her career was moving from director in the legal department to director – and eventually vice president – of investor relations. The shift took her from advising the function as a securities lawyer to leading and publicly representing it. Her CFO at the time, she recalls, 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.” Her math and finance background helped, but the role still felt, in her words, “like drinking from a fire hose,” given financial markets that operate around the clock across jurisdictions. A subsequent move into downstream strategy and value chain optimization – the latter added almost by accident when a leader departed, and the file landed on her desk, first very temporarily and then for six months – deepened her understanding of how the operating side of the business actually works.
Standing up a centralized compliance program
After six and a half years outside the legal department, Wendt returned to build something Cenovus had never had: a centralized compliance program. “In a company this size, this age, it’s not actually that often that you get an opportunity to build a new space in the company,” she says. The work involved consolidating some components of existing compliance activity under a central ethics and compliance office and formalizing coordination of compliance activities and reporting across the enterprise.
Multi-jurisdictional compliance in today’s world
Today, Cenovus is an international, complex company with offshore Atlantic Canada operations, US refining assets, and Asia Pacific operations, in addition to Western Canadian production and refining. Reconciling requirements that don’t always align between jurisdictions – Canada and the US, among them – has become a defining part of the role, she says. “I find it fun. It’s like a puzzle. I love that about it.” The complexity reflects a broader pattern, as energy companies navigate diverging cross-border regulatory and disclosure pressures.
Advice for lawyers moving in-house
Asked what advice she would give lawyers stepping into similarly complex in-house roles, Wendt returns to curiosity – a habit a senior colleague once told her never to abandon. “Ask the questions of your colleagues in legal, but more importantly, ask the questions of your peers across the business,” she says, describing how that outside perspective sharpens compliance judgment and produces more practical advice. She invokes an old saying to make the point to her own team: “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem can start to look like a nail.” The more insular a legal team becomes, she warns, the more likely it is to lose sight of the bigger picture its work is meant to serve – a theme that also runs through other lawyers’ paths into in-house legal leadership roles.
Sherry Wendt is a member of the Canadian Lawyer Leaders Network.