Career Biography

Erin Wiley acts as general counsel at Hiive, the marketplace for private stock. She brings significant expertise in securities law and in commercial transactions involving technology integrations, data, and strategic alliances, as well as product counselling across a suite of emerging technologies and industries.

Erin was previously in private practice in top legal firms in New York and Toronto, where she had multidisciplinary exposure to a broad range of legal matters in corporate and securities practices before moving in-house. She has also held a variety of roles in the fintech and financial services sectors, with broad experience across technology platforms, payments, strategic transactions, emerging technologies, and industry relations.

Erin holds a JD from Cornell Law School, a master of economic law with a specialisation in the law of economic globalisation from Sciences Po, and a master of law with a focus in business law and the law of economic globalisation from Sorbonne University. She has been admitted to practise law in New York, Ontario, and British Columbia. Wiley currently works and resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, with her husband and dog, where she enjoys maintaining an active lifestyle while taking full advantage of her proximity to the ocean.

Thank you again for the opportunity to be considered for the Legal 500 GC Powerlist Canada 2026. Please do not hesitate to reach out if I can provide any further details about my professional experience.

How do you approach managing legal risk and supporting business continuity during periods of uncertainty or disruption, particularly in highly regulated or cross-border environments?

Hiive operates at the intersection of technology and securities law – a space where regulatory complexity is the baseline, not the exception. As a FINRA member and SEC-registered broker-dealer in the US and an exempt market dealer in Canada, we navigate dual regulatory regimes simultaneously, with obligations that do not pause when market conditions get difficult.

My approach starts with a simple reframe: legal’s job is not to identify what cannot be done – it is to help the business understand what risk actually looks like, how likely it is, and whether it is worth taking. I am someone who is obsessed with risk in the most constructive sense. That means translating legal exposure into business terms, building mitigation strategies, and staying close to our regulators, whom I treat as key stakeholders, not adversaries.

We also invest heavily in proactive risk management. In a scaling company, reactive legal advice is expensive and slow. We have built our legal and compliance function around prevention: embedded counsel across product and commercial workstreams, early-stage involvement in product development, and a culture where legal and business move together rather than legal coming in at the end.

Cross-border complexity demands this even more. When regulation evolves differently on each side of the border, you cannot afford to be caught flat-footed. We want to be partners with our regulators, help them understand how we are thinking about the industry, and be part of the conversation when frameworks need to evolve.

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 adoption is one of our legal and compliance team’s strategic pillars for 2026, and we have deliberately chosen to be leaders in this space at Hiive, not followers.

In practice, that means AI is embedded across our functions: reporting automation, initial compliance screening, and contract review all incorporate AI-assisted workflows. We are also developing a bespoke CLM system in partnership with our engineering team, with legal operations cross-training in basic coding to bridge the gap. Where off-the-shelf tools do not fit our scaling private markets platform, we are building for our specific context.

All of it runs with human oversight and defined guardrails. On the ethical and privacy side, we assess tools against applicable frameworks, including PIPEDA and emerging Canadian AI guidance, before deployment, and we are deliberate about where AI augments judgement versus where lawyer review is non-negotiable. The goal is not automation for its own sake. It is a legal and compliance function that is faster, sharper, and better positioned to serve a high-growth, highly regulated business.