This is a four hour course in which we will deliver an overview of securities regulation in Canada from a practitioner’s perspective. We will review the Ontario Securities Act, regulations and policies, and will reference certain securities laws in other jurisdictions as well. We will study certain key securities regulatory concepts and how they intersect with today’s corporate finance markets. Our review will include: the meaning of terms such as “security”, “trade” and “distribution”; primary and secondary distribution of securities; prospectus offerings; private placement exemptions and resale rules; regulation of the trading markets including various stock exchange rules; capital pool companies and SPACs; continuous and timely disclosure; takeover bid legislation; mergers and acquisitions; primary and secondary market civil liability; and regulatory enforcement issues. Our goal is to have our students leave the course with a solid grounding in Canadian securities law as well as a good understanding of how these laws impact corporate finance in Canada.
Course or Seminar Category: Technology and the Law
Patents
This course deals with the law of patents in Canada. Patent law is one of the main headings of intellectual property law (along with copyrights and trademarks); trade secrets arise from a combination of contracts, equity and property law. The regime of patents protects inventions by granting inventors a limited monopoly of twenty years in exchange for disclosing the invention to society. The essential justification of the patent system is that it enables and rewards innovation. Arguments may also be made that patents afford a secure means by which inventions may be put to commercial use by investors. The course will examine the statutory basis of patent law in Canada, the judicial construction and interpretation of both primary and subsidiary regulations of Canadian patent law. The course will also locate developments in Canadian patent law in the context of international and regional transformations in the field. In this context, the course will explore contemporary controversies over the expansion of patent rights in biotechnology (from patenting mousetraps to patenting mice), and the shift from copyright protection to patent protection for computer programs. It is expected that at the course’s end, students would have a solid understanding of Canadian patent law as well as how international developments shape and influence Canadian patent law.
Legal Engineering: Tech & Innovation in Legal Service Delivery
The legal profession is at an inflection point. As artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies transform how people live, work, and interact with institutions, the delivery of legal services is being fundamentally rethought. This course explores how the legal industry can adapt—by learning from how other sectors have navigated disruption, and by developing a new mindset for engineering the future of legal practice.
This course invites students to consider how law can be redesigned to better serve clients, communities, and institutions in an era of rapid change. Drawing from real-world examples of innovation in business, healthcare, finance, and technology, students will explore how organizations have embraced transformation—and how similar strategies might apply to legal services. Through these parallels, we will challenge traditional assumptions about what lawyers do, how value is created, and what the future of legal work might look like.
Students will be introduced to foundational concepts in artificial intelligence and legal technology—not for the sake of technical fluency, but to understand their strategic implications. The focus will be on how these tools reshape client expectations, redefine workflows, and open opportunities for engineering new approaches to delivering legal solutions.
Central to the course is the application of design thinking: a user-centered, creative problem-solving methodology that will help students conceptualize new models of legal practice. Working in teams, students will identify pain points in legal service delivery and prototype innovative responses—combining legal knowledge with strategic and design-oriented thinking.
No background in technology is required – in fact, combining creative insights from a wide variety of disciplines is the focus of the course. What’s needed is a willingness to rethink the status quo, draw insights from beyond the legal field, and adopt a mindset of legal engineering—one that blends creativity, systems thinking, and a drive to build better legal futures.
NOTE: Enrolment for this course is capped at 25 and the course will be delivered in person, downtown Toronto at the offices of Gowling WLG.
Emerging Technologies: Law, Policy and Governance
Established technologies like the internet and social and emerging ones like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics, are transforming how we live, work, and interact. These changes raise a host of complex law, policy, ethical, and governance challenges in a range of domestic and global contexts, including internet censorship, the role and regulation of social media platforms, disinformation and online abuse, legal automation, algorithmic discrimination, privacy, surveillance, fintech, and cyber-warfare. Among the kinds of questions pursued in this course: Who is responsible when technology causes harms? Do we have to forego privacy for either technological innovation or security? How best to regulate social media, if at all? What can we do to prevent algorithmic discrimination and other forms of technology-enabled human rights abuse? What is “ethical” AI and how can we incentivize it?
These issues and other significant challenges and controversies in the law, policy, and governance of emerging technologies will be contextualized and brought to life via case-studies and real world scenarios involving issues that are often currently in the news and unfolding in real time outside the classroom in government, industry, and civil society. The course aims to introduce and provide a foundation in law and technology issues — to identify them, understand and think critically about them, and manage them in practice.
Criminal Law II: Cybercrime
The online world has transformed the nature of criminal activity. It has created new opportunities for offending, made criminal conduct harder to detect, altered how law enforcement investigates crime, and challenged traditional assumptions about what conduct should be treated as criminal.
This course explores these issues and more. No prior knowledge of cybercrime or technology is required. We will begin with foundational concepts before moving into a more advanced study of cyber-related criminal law and procedure. Topics will include substantive offences that regulate online conduct, digital privacy and policing, online speech, cryptocurrency, encryption, biometric searches, deepfake technology, and other emerging issues at the intersection of criminal law and technology.