The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/1547060
www.canadianlawyermag.com 33 had operated for more than a century without a single in-house lawyer. In 2024, she founded the company's first legal, privac y, and compliance depar tment, now grown to 16 professionals spanning lawyers, paralegals, a law clerk, a contract specialist, privacy specialists, and a data privacy engineer. A centralized intake process, the first of its kind at SE Health, now manages more than 1,500 requests annually. Ismail says the legal work itself wasn't the hard part. The bigger challenge was earning trust inside an organization with no template for what a legal department should look like, one where legal teams are often seen as "the department of no". Before building any formal process, she focused on relationships, work she credits partly to a nursing background that gave her a built-in understanding of the busi- ness of caring. She credits her dual background for that. "Having a nursing background and deep understanding about the healthcare system in this country really helped," she says. Instead of building a traditional legal department, she built what she calls a stra- tegic advisory function, one whose tagline, "Helping Good People Do Good Things," she says she still returns to. Teaching AI where it belongs Ismail co-led development of an AI-powered contract review system targeting up to an 80 percent reduction in processing time, now past a successful pilot and moving toward a full rollout this fall. She's precise about what she wants the technology to do and not do: augment human judgment, not replace it. AI can handle the repetitive work, identifying clauses, comparing versions, freeing her team up to provide strategic advice and giving busi- ness stakeholders direct access to informa- tion without routing every request through her department. What surprised her most was that the rollout turned out to be less about the tech- nology itself and more about change manage- ment, rethinking how the organization oper- ates without losing ownership of the final call. Placing functions where trust already lives Ismail expanded the legal pillar to include patient experience, reasoning that dissatisfied patients need an objective party to hear their concerns instead of complaining directly to the people delivering their care, which she says creates a natural power imbalance. Alternative dispute resolution, investigation, and records retention, all legal processes at their core, fit naturally under that office. Occupational health and safety followed a different path. It moved under legal during the pandemic, when infection prevention and control sat under the same umbrella and the organization needed to manage WSIB claims, accommodations, and vaccine mandates under intense pressure. With the pandemic stabilized, Ismail has since shifted OH&S back to HR, freeing her team to build out enterprise risk management instead, including a full technology overhaul of SE Health's risk management system now nearing completion. What the nursing background made possible Ismail is direct about what her dual training adds that legal training alone wouldn't. "As a lawyer, I don't think I would have been able to do my job as effectively," she says, pointing to SE Health's new social impact venture fund as the clearest example, work she says draws on strategic awareness her legal training alone wouldn't have given her. Fellow honouree and nominator Yola Ventresca, managing partner at Lerners LLP, points to the same duality. "Her dual nursing-legal background isn't just unique, it's a strategic advantage that allows her to see issues through multiple dimensions simultaneously," Ventresca says. "She doesn't wait for problems, she anticipates them." Q&A with Farah Ismail SE Health, Toronto, ON Q: You built SE Health's first legal department from the ground up in an organization that had operated for more than a century without in-house counsel. What did you have to figure out that no playbook could have prepared you for? A: What really surprised me most wasn't the legal work, it was having to earn trust. There are plenty of resources that show you how to structure a legal department, recruit- ment, hiring, governance, but there isn't a playbook for introducing a legal team into "What really surprised me most wasn't the legal work; it was having to earn trust. There isn't a playbook for introducing a legal team into an organization that's been successful for over 100 years without one" Farah Ismail, SE Health