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Olivia Regard, corporate counsel for Aggreko, food writer for The Advocate, baker, arts advocate, mother and enthusiastic traveler, joins Discover Lafayette to share the many chapters of a life that has been shaped by curiosity, creativity and a willingness to say “yes” to new experiences.
Olivia grew up in New Roads, Louisiana, and spent seven years at LSU earning her undergraduate and law degrees. She laughs that one of the perks was “seven years of cheap football tickets.”
She also holds a memorable place in LSU history: Olivia was LSU Homecoming Queen alongside Homecoming King Warren Morris, shortly after Morris hit his legendary game-winning home run in the 1996 College World Series.
After law school, Olivia began her legal career in Baton Rouge with the Jones Walker law firm. She moved to Lafayette in 2005, transferring to the firm’s Lafayette office, and later practiced with Babineaux, Poché, Anthony & Slavich before moving from private practice into the corporate world.
Her early litigation practice included environmental toxic tort defense before she transitioned into employment law. She handled matters involving non-compete agreements, proprietary information, discrimination and harassment claims, among other employment disputes. As a young lawyer, she had the opportunity to work alongside an experienced Jones Walker litigator handling cases across the country.
“I learned so much from him,” Olivia says of that early mentor.
Today, Olivia serves as Associate General Counsel for Aggreko, a global company specializing in temporary power and temperature control solutions. Aggreko’s work can range from providing power for major events to supporting data center construction, hospitals, petrochemical and refining operations, manufacturing facilities and other businesses that cannot afford an interruption in power or temperature control.
Interestingly, Aggreko is headquartered in Scotland, but its North American story has strong Acadiana roots. The company expanded into North America through the acquisition of an oil and gas business in New Iberia, and its New Iberia campus remains a significant part of its operations.
Olivia provides legal support to Aggreko’s data center and petrochemical and refining sectors, as well as its North American human resources team. Her background in employment law is particularly valuable because the role of in-house counsel is often preventative rather than reactive.
She explained the difference between private practice and corporate counsel this way: when an employment dispute reached her in private practice, “the damage was already done.” She was defending, mitigating or resolving an existing problem. In-house, the goal is to educate managers and employees, maintain compliance with applicable laws and hopefully keep disputes from developing into litigation in the first place.
“I love when I don’t have to call outside counsel to help me with a problem.”
Olivia has been with Aggreko for just over three years and has found the experience enormously rewarding.
“I have had more fun and learned more in that three-year time period than probably the 20-plus years of legal experience combined.”
Louisiana Bakes
For many people in Acadiana, however, Olivia may be just as familiar from a completely different pursuit: her Louisiana Bakes column in The Advocate.
Olivia’s love of writing goes back to sixth grade and her English teacher, Pam Whitlock, whom Olivia credits with giving her both a love of writing and confidence in her own voice.
Her love of cooking goes back even further. “My first memories of cooking were in my grandmother’s kitchen.”
Olivia grew up in New Roads in a family where, as she jokes, “I either know them or I’m related to them.” Her grandmother was a wonderful cook, remembered particularly for her fried chicken and pumpkin pie. Unfortunately, neither recipe was preserved.
“Those are the two recipes that I wish someone would have captured before she passed.”
Food, memory and family would eventually become the ingredients of Olivia’s own writing.
Like many families, the Regards spent a great deal of time in the kitchen during the COVID shutdown. Olivia sat her children down and asked everyone to choose something they wanted to learn to cook, something they wanted to eat, and something new they wanted Olivia to learn to prepare.
COVID also brought Samson, Olivia’s sourdough starter, named for her grandmother’s maiden name.
Cooking became a way of staying connected. Olivia shared recipes on Instagram and even mailed packets of yeast to friends around the country who couldn’t find it in stores.
Friend and writer Jan Risher then organized a COVID-era version of The Great British Bake Off, livestreaming participants from their kitchens as they cooked and were interviewed by judges.
That experience helped plant the seed for what came next.
A “Year of Yes”
When Jan later approached Olivia about writing for The Advocate, the invitation happened to arrive during what Olivia had privately decided would be her “year of yes.”
That didn’t mean saying yes indiscriminately. As Olivia explains, sometimes saying yes to yourself requires saying no to something else. But she wanted to be open to experiences she might ordinarily decline.
She traveled. She joined a group of 17 women paddling the Salmon River in Idaho. When someone invited her to visit, she tried to say yes.
Then came Jan’s invitation to write.
“Every inch of me wanted to say no.”
Until then, Olivia’s personal writing had largely remained private, shared with a relatively small circle through her private Instagram account. Writing for a newspaper meant putting her voice, memories and recipes before a much larger audience.
“It felt safe,” she says of her earlier writing. The newspaper column felt “very public,” opening her work to comments and criticism in a way she had never experienced before.
She said yes anyway.
“It has been an absolute labor of love.”
Since 2023, Louisiana Bakes has combined recipes with stories about family, friendship, travel, Louisiana traditions and the people who have shaped Olivia’s life.
One of her earliest lessons as a newspaper food columnist came from a satsuma tree in her backyard. She wrote about a bumper crop and recipes for using the fruit, only to discover that by the time the column was published, satsuma season was essentially over.
A reader pointed that out.
Instead of being discouraged, Olivia took the criticism to heart and became more deliberate about planning her columns months ahead, anticipating seasons, holidays and travel.
That planning still leaves room for spontaneity. When Dolly Parton died, Olivia postponed a column she already had prepared and wrote a tribute connecting Parton, Steel Magnolias, food and memories of dancing to Dolly’s music in her grandmother’s kitchen.
Her stories frequently circle back to family. She has written about picking pecans in one grandmother’s yard and is planning a piece honoring her other grandmother and her Mississippi mud cake.
The Test Kitchen
Olivia has assembled a trusted circle of friends and their children who serve as recipe testers.
At first, she had to train them.
Their reviews tended to stop at, “This is amazing.”
Olivia needed more. She wanted to know what worked, what didn’t, and what might need to be adjusted before a recipe was ready for publication. Now her testers know their job and aren’t afraid to critique.
Some recipes are classics that don’t need tinkering, such as the wonderfully simple “cup-a, cup-a, cup-a” cake made famous in Steel Magnolias: a cup of self-rising flour, a cup of sugar and a can of fruit cocktail.
Others become Olivia’s own after years of experimentation.
Her banana bread is one of those. She took elements she loved from different recipes and kept working until they “married” into the banana bread she wanted. One of her twists is fresh orange juice.
Another favorite is chocolate pavlova, a large, delicate meringue topped with whipped cream and berries. It has become one of the desserts friends request most often. Even her son once bypassed the traditional birthday cookie cake and requested his mother’s pavlova.
Next on Olivia’s baking challenge list: French macarons.
And if they fail? That may become a column, too.
Olivia is considering writing about her kitchen disasters, complete with photographs, including a lemon curd cake that tastes divine when everything works but can collapse into what she laughingly describes as essentially “a puddle of pudding” when the curd doesn’t set.
For Olivia, perfection isn’t really the point. Cooking itself is restorative. “It’s therapy for me.”
After a long workday or during difficult times, chopping, stirring and working with her hands brings a sense of peace. When friends come over, she would generally prefer they sit nearby with wine and cheese and keep her company rather than join her at the stove.
“Here’s some wine. Here’s some cheese. We’ll talk and I’ll cook.”
A Deep Commitment to the Arts
Olivia’s creative life extends well beyond her kitchen.
She traces her love of the performing arts to seeing Cats at Baton Rouge’s Centroplex as a child. She remembers being mesmerized by the production, dancing, music and singing.
After moving to Lafayette in 2005, she became involved with the Acadiana Center for the Arts, first attending events and bringing her children, then volunteering.
The connection deepened when her children attended Myrtle Place Elementary through the French immersion program. Olivia watched her daughter respond enthusiastically to arts-integrated education and began learning more about AcA’s arts education work.
“When you see something like that ignite a fire in them, it’s contagious.”
That interest led Olivia to the AcA Board of Directors, where she served for 12 years, including two years as board president. Her children practically grew up inside the organization. Her daughter even dubbed herself “assistant president” during Olivia’s tenure.
Although term limits eventually required Olivia to leave the board, she didn’t leave AcA. She remains involved through its development committee and supports major fundraising events including the Pelican Ball and Sunny Side Jazz Brunch.
The AcA’s arts education mission has long been a particularly important part of its work throughout Acadiana, reaching students through arts-integrated learning and professional teaching artists.
Olivia is also excited about AcA’s plans for the Louisiana Music Museum in the former hardware store next door to the AcA. She recently toured the space and saw renderings of the proposed facility.
“It’s going to be spectacular.”
Her service has also included time representing Acadiana with the Louisiana Division of the Arts. And when that commitment ended, Olivia naturally found another place to volunteer: Festival International de Louisiane.
She recently completed her first three-year term on Festival’s board and signed on for another three years. Festival celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2026 and continues its mission of bringing international music, art and culture into the heart of Downtown Lafayette.
Travel, Family and Seeing the World
When Olivia isn’t working, writing, baking or volunteering, chances are she is traveling or planning the next trip.
Travel has been part of her life since high school, when she spent three months in Japan as an exchange student between her junior and senior years. That experience instilled in her a preference for experiencing a place rather than simply visiting it.
She loves wandering through grocery stores when she travels, seeing what people eat, noticing what is familiar and what isn’t, and finding small restaurants where ordering dinner may require a little improvisation and charades.
This past summer, with both of her children working out of state, Olivia spent a month working remotely from Toronto.
Now another adventure awaits.
Her daughter is preparing for Semester at Sea, an academic program that will take her to countries around the world while she completes university coursework aboard a ship. Before her daughter embarks in Bangkok, mother and daughter plan to travel together to Japan.
For Olivia, the trip will be especially meaningful. She hopes to reconnect with the Japanese host family she lived with as a teenager and introduce them to her daughter.
It is a lovely full-circle moment for someone whose life seems to be built around connection: connecting people through law and community service, connecting generations through food and family recipes, connecting children to the arts, and connecting her own children to a much wider world.
We thoroughly enjoyed visiting with Olivia Regard and celebrating a woman who has found room in a demanding professional life for creativity, family, service, friendship, travel and a very good chocolate pavlova.
You can follow Olivia’s baking adventures on Instagram at @Louisiana_Bakes and find her Louisiana Bakes columns and recipes through The Advocate.
