About

Starting off as a private practice lawyer at Nabarro in 2000, Richard McLaughlin’s subsequent in-house legal career has taken him to various locations across the world, having headed legal teams at BG in Tunisia, India, Australia and the UK. Since 2014, he has led the legal function of Oman Oil Company Exploration and Production, a large upstream oil and gas company based in Muscat, Oman. Sitting on the company executive committee, McLaughlin has brought his team much closer to the business and has introduced a series of procedural enhancements to allow individual lawyers to provide more focused and pragmatic advice. Most noteworthy, however, has been McLaughlin’s achievement to alter the team’s culture: ‘We now feel we are much more proactive, and as a consequence central to transactional strategy, delivery and negotiation, dispute resolution and ethical conduct. The wider company has seen the benefit of this in several areas and our lawyers are much more visible across the company.’ During his time at BG Group, McLaughlin impressed with his transactional work, having led the transactional team for the Hasdrubal project in Tunisia. He says: ‘I was still pretty young in PQE (Post-Qualified Experience) terms, and running a complex suite of transaction documents simultaneously in English and French, plus dealing with an array of stakeholders, both internal and external, was a massive challenge, and opportunity.’ He has also received plaudits for playing a key role in large and complex oil and gas transactions whilst working at BG in Australia. When asked to give advice to fellow in-house lawyers, McLaughlin says: ‘Try to understand the business as much as you can. If you’re numerate and have the ability to broadly understand the technical aspects of how things work, even better. This is what distinguishes a good in-house lawyer.’