Governance professional of the year (small to mid-cap) Chris Gaskill, Summit Materials
Summit Materials’ Chris Gaskill has achieved a lot in a relatively short time with relatively few resources.
Soon after being promoted to executive vice president, chief legal officer and secretary in March 2021, Gaskill led the company – which had only gone public in 2015 – through several fundamental corporate governance reforms. These included declassifying the board, implementing an employee stock-purchase program, bringing ESG oversight into the board’s responsibilities, adopting a majority-vote amendment and restructuring the company’s charter to reflect the exit of its former private equity sponsor.
Gaskill pays tribute to the board for listening to what the governance changes would mean for the company, adding that there has been a great deal of positive feedback on those reforms. On top of that, he played a key role in a CEO succession and guiding the board as the company went through its post-private equity life-cycle stage.
Gaskill’s team initially comprised three people supporting a mid-cap public company with roughly 6,000 employees and operations in 21 US states and British Columbia, Canada. He recognized that technology was key to the legal department fulfilling its mission to support the company’s strategic objectives and focused on areas where he believed technology could have the biggest effect: contract management, compliance training/education and law firm management.
For example, it is impossible for the team to conduct in-person training with all of Summit Materials’ employees so Gaskill worked with the HR department and in-house digital and video teams to develop training resources tailored to the company, focusing on antitrust issues, insider trading and the code of ethics.
He also rebuilt the legal department by hiring four attorneys covering areas such as corporate governance, litigation, employment, commercial, securities and environmental matters. He has further devised a five-year strategy for the team that includes additional use of technology, embracing equity and belonging and enabling the department to bring more work in-house.
‘Corporate governance works best when you create the right framework for people to make the right decisions,’ Gaskill comments.
