Alison McNeil

Alison is a qualified lawyer with extensive experience in the oil and gas industry, working with a range of Government, National Oil Company, International Oil Company and contractor counterparties in oil and gas licensing and operations, new business development, joint venture set-up and governance, and acquisitions and divestments. She also has expertise in whistle-blower management, incident response and investigation.

Alison spent two assignments in The Hague between 2001 and 2006 and again between 2016 and 2020; she was based in Dubai between 2007 and 2010. She was a member of the Oil and Gas UK Operators’ Legal Committee between 2011 and 2016.

Alison has had a long career in-house, initially with British Aerospace, followed by 23 years with the Royal Dutch Shell group of companies, where she took a leading legal role in negotiations and operations in multiple jurisdictions including the USA, China, Kazakhstan, Qatar, Libya, Oman, Abu Dhabi, Iraq and the UK and held several senior management roles including Head of Legal for Shell’s UK Upstream business.

Most recently she had global responsibility for the management of Shell’s corporate whistleblowing programme and internal corporate investigation function, running the Group Business Integrity Committee and reporting to the Board Audit Committee and Executive Committee. She led significant improvements in the delivery of actionable insights from investigations, drove business accountability for trackable and measurable actions from incidents, and strengthened cross-functional partnerships to deliver holistic performance improvement.

She is a member of the Law Society of Scotland, qualifying in 1991 and has an Honours Degree in Law and Diploma in Legal Practice from the University of Dundee.