About

Currently leading the legal efforts of Home Depot’s Canada business, Sarah Qadeer manages enterprise risk and supervises a team of corporate lawyers, while providing business-minded advice on a wide array of matters including commercial negotiations, competition, privacy, product liability, consumer protection, anti-corruption and marketing and advertising law. After graduating from McGill Law Faculty, Qadeer’s legal career began as an associate in the corporate and securities law practice of one of Canada’s major national firms, McCarthy Tétrault. She then made her move in-house joining the legal department of an investment bank, BMO Nesbitt Burns, eventually becoming vice president and legal counsel. Apart from her remarkable achievements to improve the operation of Home Depot’s legal department in the form of hiring a team of talented lawyers, introducing fixed fee arrangements for work with outside counsel and creating templates, checklists and training decks for a number of business lines, Qadeer has also become a valued and vocal part of the senior leadership team on issues beyond legal. More specifically, Qadeer is proud if her involvement in the Incident Response Team of the global enterprise, as well as being the Canadian lead on crisis management issues. ‘I led the Canadian team on the data breach response and while challenging, it was also very rewarding and appreciated’, she asserts. One of Qadeer’s biggest challenges has been supporting the business in a period of growth with a limited availability of resources. This has required innovative and strategic thinking on when and how to deploy resources. More recently Qadeer has been dealing with rapid and comprehensive regulatory changes to privacy and anti-spam laws that has required keeping up with Competition Bureau guidelines and keeping pace with changes to product liability requirements. Qadeer effectively tackled this challenge by using outside counsel as partners, by networking and sharing extensively with other GCs, and by joining industry groups and CLO groups for knowledge sharing.