Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/1171384
www.canadianlawyermag.com/inhouse 35 ities were being applied to com- pliance tools, Moss says it was important that the compliance officers understand exactly what was going on. He also says it isn't the type of black box operation that is often part of an AI implementation. "We can absolutely articulate to a regulator 'the data is coming from here, this is what's being done with the data, it is being presented this way.' I spent a significant amount of my career as a regulator, and being able to replicate and understand what the system has is obviously very important to the regulator. We have a firm understanding of all the components that go into it, what decisions or actions are being made and the output," he says. It's the output that has made a difference to how the bank's compliance officers do their job, according to Moss. He likens their pre-AI tasks approach the Hospital for Sick Children and the Toronto Academic Health Science Network have adopted to replace their conflict of interest reporting procedures. As part of its compliance policy and as a Compliance through co-operation and collaboration Sick Kids and TAHSN implement new online system for physicians and researchers to disclose affiliations with the medical industry CATEGORY: Compliance systems DEPARTMENT SIZE: Large COMPANY: Bank of Montreal CATEGORY: Compliance systems DEPARTMENT SIZE: Small COMPANY: Toronto Academic Health Sciences Network to searching for needles in haystacks. Now, the AI solution hands them the equivalent of a large pile of needles. Being freed up from the more basic and time-consuming challenges means the compliance team is able to be engaged with more interesting and complex work—work that tends to challenge their existing skills. Providing compliance employees with training and teaching them different skillsets is some- thing Moss considers to be a core job for senior compliance officers. He adds that chief among the newly needed skills is the ability to react to real-time data. "It's a skillset to have someone be given an exception report that generates information for them to follow up on it on a very fast-paced basis, versus a skillset of someone who's oth- erwise spending time researching and pulling information together to create the underlying information." While such a fast development and deployment cycle is somewhat unusual for a built-from-scratch project, Gibson says the people working on it made it possible. Excited people become project champions and cheerleaders, and Gibson says that's exactly what any company needs if it wants to create and deploy any kind of successful project. "When I first stepped into the role and they told me what they were doing, I was like 'This is amazing. And we have to roll it out to the busi- nesses. And we have to let other people within legal and regulatory compliance know about it, so that we can potentially leverage it to other areas. And I'm going to be your cheerleader, so let's set up these meetings. And I'm going to introduce you to these people. And we've shown our ombudsman, we've shown our chief ethics and conduct officer — all people who are very interested in this," she says. "I can't put my fingers on any challenges we encountered, and that's partly because of the personalities involved; the folks on my team, they were just so engaged and so excited about it. And I think their excitement was contagious." means of transparency, SickKids required physicians and researchers who worked at the hospital to disclose any affiliations they had with the medical industry. This could include situations such as sitting on a scientific advisory board of a pharmaceutical company or working as a funded research partner with a medical device manufacturer. It's not that the hospital wanted to discour- age doctors and scientists from taking those positions. According to Wendy Law- rence, director of com- pliance, privacy and risk management at SickKids, the research hospital wanted to "en- courage [people] looking for those opportunities and to make them more effective," while at the same time improving their compli- ance reporting system. "We were saying relationships are a good thing. They're key to the innovation mandate of all of our academic hospitals and we're going to focus on managing that," she says. In order to manage those relationships CONFLICT OF INTEREST is a familiar concept to lawyers and compliance officers. Relationship management is a much broader and more vague term that is applied to a wide range of busi- ness situations and applications. It's also the Ross DeBoni, Director, Legal, Leah Daniels, Director, Legal and Compliance, Wendy Lawrence, Director of Compliance, Privacy and Risk Management, Sarah Lowy, Director, Corporate Legal Services & Corporate Counsel, Tamara Birkenheier, Director, Legal and Compliance and Sara Gottlieb, Legal Counsel.