About

After assuming his position as chief legal and regulatory officer at the telecommunications company TekSavvy Solutions, Bram Abramson formed a functional legal department practically from scratch, hiring all lawyers and defining the scope of the department’s activities. Abramson pulled legal, regulatory and government relations work in-house, while slicing up legal and regulatory work to be done in a way that would allow new hires to be effective and to maintain a high level of enthusiasm and internalise expertise. ‘I did that by orienting our work around our company’s agreements’, Abramson explains, ‘and dividing things up into three domains: commercial agreements, consumer agreements, and regulated agreements’. Upon joining the company in March 2014, Abramson identified privacy as a key vector for TekSavvy Solutions and its customers. He says: ‘Our organisation lives and dies based on the trust that its customers place in it. When I joined, I made maintaining and extending TekSavvy’s privacy reputation a key priority. We were the first Canadian telecommunications company to issue a “transparency report”, and have been twice ranked as Canada’s most pro-privacy ISP’. Among a number of achievements in his career, Abramson takes particular pride in his accomplishment to establish a successful public policy and regulatory ‘voice’ by intervening regularly in public proceedings.