Canadian Lawyer

34 J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 9 w w w . c a n a d i a n l a w y e r m a g . c o m Insurance defence boutiques are increasingly specializing in new emerging areas to stay ahead By Aidan Macnab T O P B O U T I Q U E S "I t's kind of an exciting time to be a lawyer in insurance defence," says William Chalmers, managing partner at Hughes Amys LLP. Privacy in the digital realm, regulated by the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, and how the market and legal sphere adapt to and govern legal marijuana, is going to produce compelling work in the future, he says. "What's going to happen over the next five or 10 years is really going to be amazing. I think you're going to see a wholesale, 100-per-cent change in how we do business and what kind of cases we deal with." Cyber-insurance is Dolden Wallace Folick LLP's fastest-growing area, according to founding partner Eric Dolden. Under PIPEDA, there are mandatory security-breach-notice require- ments, which were instituted on Nov. 1, 2018. Insurers are developing prod- ucts that, when a customer has been the victim of ransomware or a success- ful phishing operation, pay for restoring lost data or forensics to find out who took the data and help the affected party satisfy the demands of the government's privacy com- missioners, says Dolden. These types of insurance will also cover giving notice of a breach to customers and clients, as there is a variety of torts for inva- sion of privacy and a statutory cause of action under PIPEDA, and six provinces have their own privacy legislation, which makes one liable if they store someone's personal information and it's accessed by an unauthorized third party, he says. More than that, since 2012, the Ontario Court of Appeal has had a privacy tort called intrusion upon seclusion, providing a common law remedy when dealing with a province that does not have a privacy act statute, he says. He adds that, in Ontario and Newfoundland, plaintiffs can "stack claims," suing under dif- ferent laws for the same violation to increase claimant recovery. "Developments in this area are happening at warp speed. It's amazing," he says. Dolden recently settled a class action against the city of Calgary, after someone in the city workers compensation department sent a spreadsheet with thousands of names, medical information and salaries and workers compen- sation benefits to another municipality. New work for lawyers coming out of the regulations around data security is just one EMBRACING CHANGE

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