Dual roles are nothing new to the lawyer and novelist, who was set to launch her second non-fiction work in March. While her business card may say president, general counsel is still very much part of her daily duties.

This petite powerhouse likes working in foresty, an industry which is still male dominated. The five-foot, barely 100-pound Giardini says she is addicted to the pace at Weyerhaeuser and starts to twitch if there aren’t a million things to do.

Aside from her dual roles, Giardini is a volunteer with the YWCA’s Women of Distinction Awards, a journalist, and mother of three.

By the looks of things, she won’t be twitching anytime soon. At 9 a.m. on the day we meet in the president’s cubicle at Weyerhaeuser, Giardini is already halfway through the morning. She clutches her BlackBerry, anticipating another multi-tasking day. A friend may call because she needs Giardini to help get her car towed; her daughter has a broken leg and needs her attention; and Insurance Corp. of British Columbia will soon telephone because her son got into a car accident a few days ago. “That’s just life,” she says, laughing. When that’s done, she needs to tackle the stacks of paperwork currently scattered around her modest space. On one surface lies her “must-read” pile, comprising about 30 publications, from Benchers Bulletin to Truck Logger magazine, “full of nifty news and stuff you can get,” says Giardini, visibly excited. She flips open a page and admires a logging truck. “Most all of this is interesting, except the pages of statistics.”

“Forestry is the backbone of our economy,” she says. “I adore going to operating facilities. Not only that, they are the life blood of the company, we exist to make sure those operations run successfully.”

Giardini had a fascination with forestry long before Weyerhaeuser hired her in Kamloops 15 years ago. She credits her civil engineer father with getting her interested in heavy equipment, how things are made and how resources are used in our everyday lives. “I see his engineer approach to things, if there is a problem, you look for ways to solve it.”

That’s advice well-taken in her new role. Giardini represents Weyerhaeuser in Canada and she is responsible for ensuring the company’s overall compliance with all legal requirements, from financial to environmental to sustainability issues. Although the forestry industry is suffering, Giardini says the company has certain advantages over its competition including liquidity, vision, and history. Weyerhaeuser has been operating for 110 years, and more than 40 of those years in Canada.

Giardini’s wide-ranging interests are a boon to Weyerhaeuser in all kinds of ways. “Anne also continues to work on law matters here so sometimes she attends meetings for legal-related issues such as negotiating contracts with First Nations bands,” says Deanna Stad, her legal assistant for the past 12 years. “She might discuss plans to harvest in their claimed area or negotiate how we can work with them."

Like countless other firms, Weyerhaeuser has downsized over the past few years. Consequently, Giardini has taken on more work and she travels more often.

“Whatever gets thrown on her desk, she will read it,” says Stad. “On the flight to Toronto yesterday, she took 20 trade magazines, a handful of reports and law firm newsletters, and she’ll read them all. Then she will get to work and pull out a pile of reading material with several items dog-eared for me to distribute internally. ‘Our financial guy should be aware of this, look at this new logging truck, someone else is doing biofuel, is there anything we can learn from them?’ she’ll say in one breath.”

Stad says she was really green when Giardini hired her. “Anne’s way of testing me was taking me into her office where the floor was covered with little stacks of paper, all her filing was literally on the floor in organized piles. She asked if I could help her. ‘Sure, no problem,’ I replied. It was a set-up; she wanted to see if I would freak. This woman is a paper machine, she does a myriad of things and needs to keep track. She is a book person, and I think she likes the feel of paper. . . .” Even though Stad doesn't like the piles of filing, “It’s a small price to pay, Anne has been a tremendous mentor and I consider her a friend.”

“She’s the Energizer Bunny,” says Charlotte Bell, her close friend and associate counsel at Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, who articled at Vancouver’s Bull Housser & Tupper in 1985-86 with Giardini. “I have the utmost respect for her as a lawyer, wife, and mother. She worked her way up through Weyerhaeuser and she’s still married to her first husband with three great kids, and she is a true friend.”