Features Region: Canada

Born in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, Alison McCullough-Butchart initially took the traditional route to becoming a lawyer—receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1997 and then, two years later, her Master of Law from The Queen’s University of Belfast. While obtaining her master’s, McCullough-Butchart attended the University of Manitoba in Canada as a visiting graduate […]

His 20-year legal career almost evenly divided between the first half in private practice and the rest with OMERS, the pension plan for Ontario municipal employees, Brodie Swartz describes why he finds the latter responsibility more compelling. “It may sound trite to say, but each day you get up to work for over 500,000 people […]

On an overcast day in the Spring of 2009, Shalomi Abraham woke up early, packed his lunch, put on a crisp suit and showed up for his first day on the job with a large coffee in hand. While being trotted around the company for the requisite introductions, the last thing he expected was hearing […]

Quite the corporate change that Sébastien Guénette signed on for in June 2019. He just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to apply his legal and business credentials as Juul Labs Canada committed to transitioning millions of adult smokers from combustible cigarettes while combatting underage use of its products. While there would be short-term losses, the company and him saw […]

Funny how “completion” work, used in energy exploration, is never quite finished. At least that’s the case for Jesse Moe, who oversees legal affairs as senior legal counsel for Calgary-based Packers Plus Energy Services Inc. Since joining the company in September 2016, Moe has seen the upswings and downturns in the oil and gas industry […]

As Atoussa Mahmoudpour has observed, the COVID-19 pandemic has done something for healthcare that little else could: It led to a much greater use of remote care. For many patients, online appointments, including video or audio-only chats, became a necessity. Mahmoudpour is the chief legal officer of the largest single-chain network of primary care clinics […]

Prior to joining Canadian Solar, John Marner didn’t know much about solar energy. Despite this, he soon became the company’s first lawyer to oversee the development, construction and sale of solar farms. In the 11 years since then, he’s rolled out the solar farm business globally, which has allowed Canadian Solar’s manufacturing arm to grow […]

The business world trends toward paperless, but not without risk. Each week seems to bring forth more news of data breaches and ransomware. Michael Acedo reminds that the Canadian-headquartered, cloud-based information management specialist OpenText Corp., is well-prepared to manage content or unstructured data for its private and public sector clientele both securely and to help […]

A young lawyer who had just achieved partnership in his second go-around with a prestigious Toronto firm, Chris Figel began to feel like the de facto general counsel of AirBoss of America Corp. during the late 2010s. The Canadian-based company supplies compounded and engineered rubber products to heavy industries and North America’s armed forces. It had […]

It never hurts to retain an outsider’s perspective, even when one is an in-house lawyer. Maybe especially so. So says Greg Kerr who’s held in-house positions with Wolseley Canada since 2013, his most recent promotion being to general counsel and vice president of legal, risk and compliance in July 2019. That’s put him in charge […]