Gibb's first job after graduating was filing cuttings for the news film agency Visnews, which she left after six months and joined the Times Higher Education Supplement. Gibb worked for four years on the Times Higher Education Supplement. She then moved to The Daily Telegraph, where she was art sales correspondent for two years. Her job included covering major auctions and sales, sometimes controversial, and at one time took her to India to cover a huge jewelry sale. She returned to The Times and worked for almost forty years as a reporter. As a general reporter at The Times she covered stories such as the 1980 Dan-Air Flight 1008 crash in Tenerife and the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. She saw an opportunity to obtain more predictable work when The Times legal editor Marcel Berlins resigned so he could become an author of crime novels. Since she was not a lawyer, she had to overcome some resistance from the editor, Charles Douglas-Home, but persuaded him that skill in communicating to the public was more important than legal training. She became The Times Legal Editor in 1982. She was aged 31 at the time. At the start of her career she found that judges were "generally aloof, inaccessible and often condescending". Her lack of legal qualifications was an issue to some of them. The job was demanding, since many experts in the law scanned each article for errors. She was in charge of daily reporting on legal news, as well as weekly pages on the law and supplements for law students. She launched the newspaper's daily legal bulletin, The Brief, and was co-editor of The Brief. In 2009 at an International Council of Jurists ceremony in London Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers presented an award to Frances Gibb, Legal Affairs Editor at The Times. She served under nine editors on The Times. Editors included William Rees-Mogg and John Witherow.
Retirement
Gibb retired from The Times on 7 February 2019. At the time of Gibb's retirement a motion was tabled in the House of Commons by Keith Vaz and sponsored by Drew Hendry: In retirement Gibb would continue to articles to The Times from time to time. She was to become a visiting professor in the Open Universitylaw school.
