Team size: 14

What are the most significant matters, transactions, or legal initiatives you and your team have been involved in over the past 12–18 months?

Over the past 18 months, our team has been focused on three key areas: significant litigation, compliance transformation, and legal operations.

On the litigation side, we have managed a number of complex class actions and commercial disputes involving competition law, payments, fuel distribution, and post-acquisition matters across multiple jurisdictions.

At the same time, we have been building and enhancing our enterprise compliance program, including risk assessments, whistleblower and investigations processes, third-party risk management, and governance structures designed to support a growing global organisation.

We have also invested heavily in legal operations and cross-border collaboration. With a relatively lean team supporting a business that operates across North America and Europe, a major focus has been creating scalable processes, improving efficiency, and ensuring legal resources are concentrated on areas that create the greatest business value.

What impact, if any, has AI had on your legal function to date, and how are you approaching its use in a way that aligns with Canadian regulatory, privacy, and ethical considerations?

AI has already had a significant impact on our legal function.

We operate with a very lean team supporting a large and complex international business. AI has allowed us to increase productivity, accelerate research and drafting, improve knowledge sharing, and automate administrative work without adding additional headcount. It effectively multiplies the capacity of our team and allows our lawyers to spend more time on judgment, strategy, and business partnering.

That said, adoption must be accompanied by strong governance. We approach AI through the lens of privacy, confidentiality, cybersecurity, and responsible use. Legal has an important role in helping establish policies and guardrails that allow the business to innovate while managing risk appropriately.

I view AI as one of the most significant developments affecting the legal profession. It will not replace lawyers, but it will change how we work. The legal teams that embrace it thoughtfully will be able to deliver more value, more quickly, and with greater consistency.

How does your legal team contribute to broader business strategy within your organisation, and can you share an example where legal input materially influenced a key decision or outcome?

The role of an in-house legal team today extends well beyond legal advice. Our objective is to help the business achieve its goals while managing risk in a practical and commercially sound way.

One example is our ongoing work to strengthen compliance and governance across the organisation. Rather than treating compliance as a regulatory requirement, we positioned it as a business enabler that supports sustainable growth, operational resilience, and stakeholder confidence. This approach helped secure leadership support, align functions across the business, and establish a clear roadmap for implementation.

More broadly, legal contributes by providing practical advice on issues ranging from litigation and regulatory developments to strategic initiatives and enterprise risk. The greatest value we can provide is helping the business navigate complexity and make informed decisions with confidence.