Power player

Carter M. Reid, L’93, was just three years out of law school when a fascinating job offer came along.

Thomas F. Farrell II, then Dominion Resources general counsel, now its chairman, president, and CEO, asked her to join Dominion’s holding company in a three-person legal office.

“I’d never thought about working in the energy industry, but I had done a lot of financing work and M&A” as an associate at McGuire Woods and then Hunton and Williams. Soon, she found herself executing international mergers and acquisitions at a higher level than she would have seen for years at a big firm.

“It was an incredibly exciting opportunity,” she said.

Today, she may have the longest title of anyone working at the company now called Dominion Energy: executive vice president, chief administrative and compliance officer, and corporate secretary.

In Reid’s more than 20 years at Dominion, her role has expanded to include oversight of a variety of support functions for the firm’s subsidiaries and working with the board of directors to be sure “they see what they need to see” to ensure they stay on top of the projects, approvals, and governance trends the highly regulated industry requires.

Each of Dominion’s subsidiaries is responsible for its own compliance, and Reid works with them as a facilitator and coordinator.

“We talk about trends, emerging issues, and share best practices,” she said. “Compliance is an incredibly complex area in today’s environment.”   

Reid also plays a leading role in Dominion’s proposed $7.9 billion acquisition of SCANA Corp. She works alongside the CEOs and other leaders of the two companies “to make sure the merger goes through.” Given the regulations, financing, politics, and massive scale of the merger, “we have to make sure everything is done properly.”

The keys to success in these complex proceedings are “having really good people on the team and having an appreciation for the importance of change management,” she said. “It requires careful coordination in so many areas to make sure everyone is going in the same direction.”

Reid is enthusiastic about her career at Dominion.

“I enjoy coordinating, coming up with a goal, and then driving to reach it, even when you think there’s no way to get this done,” she said. “And then when you do, it’s great.”