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Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/1183528
www.canadianlawyermag.com 31 Thompson advises in many areas where hype is easy to come by but detailed knowledge is slim: Artificial Intelligence: Companies will come to Thompson and say they want to use AI because "everybody has artificial intelligence." After doing a deep dive into the company's data, which is often in disparate formats, and its strategy, she will sometimes conclude that a good old-fashioned Excel spreadsheet will do the job. Cybersecurity: Having advised on more than 100 cyberbreaches, Thompson says they now have a "a cadence to the routine." However, what continues to surprise her is the "ingenuity" of it. "It's less and less the one-off hacker in somebody's basement. Increasingly, it's organized business crime. So, these are sophisticated, well-funded entities that are targeting companies." Blockchain: While acknowledging the hype cycle for this technology is on the wane, she says its real impact will be felt behind the scenes. "It has the potential to take out an entire compliance department in a large financial institution." BEYOND THE HYPE For Thompson, though, it started to dawn on her that privacy wasn't really the underlying issue for companies dealing with technology. And, unlike what the software and hardware her clients were dealing with could offer, Thompson had to think more creatively about where things were going to go. "I was really focused on privacy for about two years. And then it dawned on me that it wasn't about privacy; it was about [the] managing of information." All her clients, she realized, were dealing with different types of data. "They're all trying to protect it. They're trying to hang on to it, they are trying to recover it if it's gotten away from them. They are trying to leverage it for value." This eventually brought her to Dentons, where even geographical boundaries are often irrelevant. "If you are in the world of intangibles, which is largely what my world is, I have to worry less about borders than most people. Very few companies come to me with a jurisdictionally limited data problem." In her current position at Dentons, Thompson does not specialize in any industry. Recently, she helped her firm launch what it calls "Dentons data" where companies can get project management and a fixed price and timeline to get a data- related project up and running. When she was an inhouse lawyer, Thompson noticed that things such as document retention and contract management were often pushed aside for more pressing concerns, so this offering is meant to help address that gap. Thompson continues to jump around in her pursuits, including taking coding courses online and manipulating data on her own, "just so I can understand some of the technologies my clients are using." For Thompson, the rules and categories, like the 1s and 0s that power the machines her clients use, are simply means to achieve a result that needs to be driven by a human strategy. And when humans are involved, things are never predictable. "I love what I do. And I finally was able to stitch together the thing that drove me out of journalism, the thing that drove me out of biochemistry. I've now been able to stitch it together in an area that is both high level and detail oriented and this sort of mess you never know what you're going to get."