Andrea Wood didn’t expect to win a lifetime achievement award just yet. “I feel as though I still have a lifetime ahead of me. I hope so,” she says. But receiving the Dye & Durham Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Legal Profession – In-House at the Canadian Law Awards triggered a rare moment of pause. “It gave me an opportunity to look backward and think about some of the… fun things I've had the privilege of doing in my career.”
Now chief legal and governance officer at TELUS, Wood’s path through the legal world has been defined by range and reinvention. “I'm really proud of being able to shift and learn and move from industry to industry, and to continue to evolve my knowledge of the law as needed,” she says.
Her early experience came at Fraser and Beatty, now Dentons. A few years in, she joined Alliance Communications. “I moved from being a banking lawyer to being an entertainment lawyer,” she says. “The piece of that transition that helped was my knowledge of banking law was immediately put to use at Alliance because I became involved in pulling together the bank financing for… the biggest movie that Alliance had then produced, Johnny Mnemonic.”
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She spent 17 years at Alliance Atlantis, a time that saw her role expand far beyond entertainment law. “I moved from being just an entertainment lawyer to becoming the general counsel,” she says. “We had gone from being a private company to being a public company, so I found myself general counsel of a public company and corporate secretary to a public board, so that required me to pick up some new skills along the way and taught me how to rely very heavily on people who knew what they were doing.”
After the company was sold, Wood moved briefly into private practice before taking on a vastly different role at Wind Mobile. “Within a couple of weeks of me arriving, my current employer, TELUS, wrote to the regulator, the CRTC, and said, we don't think Wind is sufficiently Canadian… that launched me into a five-year fight to protect Wind’s ability to continue to operate,” she says.
When she joined Wind, she was the only lawyer. “Eventually, we… took on a couple of other lawyers, but I joined before it launched and saw it through five years of operation,” she says. “Hugely challenging, incredible workloads… but [this] also required me to learn a lot, very quickly.”
She later joined TELUS, initially as VP of consumer. “The nice thing about being at a company like TELUS is… the company grows … into all kinds of interesting new areas,” she says. “We developed an agriculture technology business, a consumer goods business… we grew our health business very dramatically…
“If there's a theme to my career, I think it's been that I've been prepared to… say yes to trying new things, and then I've worked like hell to gain the skills that I needed and the knowledge I needed to do the job properly.”
At TELUS, where she leads a large legal group, Wood sees the role of in-house counsel as multifaceted. “We have some people who are what we call treasures,” she says. “They're deeply expert in what they do, and they're very happy doing that.” However, success in other in-house roles often depends on adaptability. “When you're in smaller organizations, it's harder to specialize… I had to generalize, and that is a different skill set in and of itself.”
Leadership presents another layer. “Ultimately your career growth depends on your ability to manage people,” she says. “Lawyers often mistake supervising with managing. Managing a team and managing an in-house budget is very different… than supervising.”
Strong interpersonal skills remain non-negotiable. “Even if you're one of the treasures… you need to be able to work effectively with your in-house clients,” she says. “I do think that there will always be a need for all lawyers to have strong communication skills and… strong people skills.”
The demands on in-house teams are evolving fast – and technology is a critical driver. “In-house lawyers need to become technologically proficient,” she says. “If there's one thing I'm encouraging every team to do right now, it is to play with AI and to really deliberately try to learn it.”
Wood points to her own team’s early work with generative tools. “We've got a number of people on the team who are extremely innovative and who started to use large language models very early on… coaching my… entire team in getting people to experiment with building co-pilots,” she says. “You will be less productive than your colleagues unless you're able to leverage co-pilots, create your own co-pilots, but also use co-pilots that other people have created.”
Regulatory pressure remains a constant. “Telecom regulation has been very challenging for us,” she says. “We are fighting to maintain access to the east… to continue to be able to offer retail internet over wholesale fibre.”
TELUS’s growing health business brings its own legal demands. “Keeping ahead of the health regulatory regime is challenging… that means 10 provinces and… federal government requirements,” she says. “Maintaining that is challenging.”
Global expansion has compounded the complexity. “We now operate in something like 40 countries internationally,” she says. “Building teams in those countries, managing those teams remotely and ensuring that we are complying with all applicable local laws is becoming more and more challenging.”
On the policy side, Wood pushes for simplification, including the elimination of interprovincial trade barriers, she says. “If the provinces were to… stop trying to supplement federal regulation with their own provincial regulation, that would be helpful.”
And she wants to see more support for Canadian companies trying to scale. “Help Canadian champions to succeed at home,” she says. “I sometimes feel as though we are not given that opportunity in a way that would benefit Canadians.”
As a member of the Canadian Lawyer editorial board, Wood is a judge for the Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers list, a role that brings her into contact with stories of impact and advocacy across the country. “I look for people who are really making a difference in their communities,” she says. “It's really inspiring to read some of the nominations… people are doing some extraordinary things that are really driving… a lot of people's lives, and driving impact.”
Andrea Wood is also a judge for the 2025 Canadian Law Awards. Winners will be unveiled on May 7 at a gala event in Toronto.