Flora Francis – Burckhardt Compression

The conversation that changed Flora Francis’s life lasted maybe ten minutes. She was in Atlanta, attending an event where Elizabeth Holtzman — the legendary former Brooklyn district attorney — was speaking. After the talk, Francis made her way over, introduced herself, and asked Holtzman about the office. Holtzman described the work, the culture, the energy of a place teeming with young lawyers all learning their craft at once and told her to send in her resume, which she did. She got an interview. She got the job. It was, she says now, a decision she never saw coming — and one that set everything else in motion.

Flora Francis | Burckhardt Compression | Managing Counsel

“I went to law school thinking I’d be an attorney helping people in my community,” Francis says. “I thought I’d be a solo practitioner, somewhere close to where I grew up.”

Instead, she became managing counsel for the Americas at Burckhardt Compression, a Swiss industrial manufacturer and global leader in reciprocating compressor technology, serving critical sectors such as oil and gas, hydrogen energy, and industrial processing. The path between those two points — the idealistic young attorney imagining a neighborhood practice and the seasoned in-house leader overseeing legal affairs across an entire hemisphere — is one of the most unconventional in American law. It runs through courtrooms, federal agencies, corporate boardrooms, and international arbitration panels. And it began, improbably, with a chance conversation at a speaking event.

A career built on saying yes

Francis joined the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office and spent four years there as an assistant district attorney, eventually working in the sex crimes unit. The work was meaningful — and eventually, it was too much. The trauma of talking with victims day after day wore on her, and she began looking for something different. That quality — the willingness to recognize when a chapter has run its course and step toward the next one — would define her career again and again.

She transitioned to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, joining after seeing a job posting and applying on a hunch. The agency was building a criminal investigations unit, and her law enforcement background made her a natural fit. She spent nearly four years there as associate chief counsel for enforcement and eventually associate chief counsel for Biologics. Opportunities at the FBI followed, where she served as assistant general counsel for more than six years, and then time at the DEA and the Office of the Inspector General, all of which are part of the U.S. Department of Justice. She moved between agencies, doing similar work in different contexts, and she noticed something important: every move made her sharper, more adaptable, more capable of learning quickly in unfamiliar terrain and gave her an early insight into what is expected of in-house counsel-no, is rarely the right answer

“What I have learned is that the beauty of being a lawyer is that the basic analytical skills they teach you in law school will help you to be able to learn new areas of law on the go,” Francis says. “When you go to law school, you don’t really know what type of law you want to do until you start doing it. When you start doing it is when you really develop your skills and your analytical abilities.”

Eventually, Francis made the leap to the private sector — nudged, she admits, by the realities of government pay. A friend at Microsoft mentioned her name at the right moment, and Francis joined the company as compliance investigations manager. What followed was the most demanding professional challenge of her career. She was tasked with developing and implementing a global compliance investigations process from scratch, building a function that brought together multiple investigative units to assist in reports directly to the board. It required not just legal expertise but organizational diplomacy — persuading teams across the company to align around a common framework they had not asked for and did not initially understand.

“It was very challenging, with multiple investigative units,” Francis says. “But at the end, all the teams understood why we were doing what we did. It was the best for the company.”

From litigation to compliance

She left Microsoft — the environment in Washington state, she says, wasn’t for her — and joined GE Oil & Gas, where she would spend nearly eleven years leading litigation and compliance teams across the Americas. It was there that she added another unexpected tool to her kit. Her boss asked her to take on international arbitrations, an area she had never touched. She wanted to take a training course first. He told her to do an arbitration and then take the course. She did — and concluded several successfully.

The lesson stuck. Discomfort, she learned, was rarely a reason to say no. It was usually a reason to say yes.

After GE, she held roles at Baker Hughes, Wood, and Fluor Corporation before joining Burckhardt Compression in September 2023. The role is unlike anything she has held before. There was no existing legal infrastructure for the Americas when she arrived — no prior attorney, no established processes, no playbook. She has been building it.

“It is a completely different role,” she says. “Here, I am responsible for everything — commercial matters, litigation, compliance, policies. I am still learning something every day.”

A program built to protect

A centerpiece of her current work is helping to develop a global compliance program for Burckhardt Compression — a project she knows, from experience, is as much about culture as it is about policy. She has seen firsthand, particularly at Microsoft, how organizations can resist the very systems designed to protect them, not out of malice but out of misunderstanding.

The goal of any compliance program, in her view, is not simply to produce a set of rules. It is to help a company understand where its risks actually reside, create practical ways to address them, and ensure that everyone who represents the organization — employees and business partners alike — operates with integrity. A robust compliance posture is also a competitive advantage: companies known for ethical practices attract better partners, better talent, and better business.

Her position on Burckhardt’s leadership team means she is seen as a thought leader contributing beyond strictly legal matters — weighing in on people management, strategy, operations, and recently trade controls, and the turbulence that tariff policy has introduced into global supply chains. It is, she says, the kind of role that rewards range.

Taking a bigger look

Flora Francis keeps a mental list of the moments that could have gone differently. The evening she approached Liz Holtzman or the lunch with a friend who mentioned her name to someone at Microsoft. The colleague at GE who turned out to be her path to Burckhardt. She thinks about those moments often, not with sentimentality, but with purpose.

“There is something to be said about networking and making good friends in the workplace,” she says. “You never know who you’re talking to and how important even a small moment can be. And more importantly, you never know what someone thinks of you until you ask them for help.”

She is already thinking about what comes next. She earned a mediator certification in 2018 and has long been drawn to commercial mediation as a possible next chapter — a role that would let her put decades of legal instinct to work in a new way. Teaching, too, is in her. Her parents were educators, as were their parents before them. Whatever form her next act takes, it will almost certainly arrive as it always has: as an opportunity she was ready to take.

“It hasn’t always been easy,” Francis says. “There have been challenges, especially as a black woman in the law.”

Francis chooses to engage with those challenges as stories and learning opportunities. But no matter what challenge arises, she continues to learn from it and move on, realizing that you can only control what you can control.