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Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/1547060
52 www.canadianlawyermag.com FEATURE INHOUSE INTERVIEWS WHY THE PRIVACY PROGRAM YOU BUILT YEARS AGO IS YOUR BEST AI GOVERNANCE TOOL The most important tool for governing artificial intelligence responsibly is one that most companies already own: the privacy program built years ago. That is the central lesson Sahil Razdan has drawn from a career spent where data privacy, technology, and advertising meet. Now senior legal counsel at Samsung Electronics Canada and chair of the board of the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada (IAB Canada) AI and Emerging Technology Committee, Razdan is convinced that the lawyers best equipped to handle AI treat it as an extension of privacy, not a separate discipline. His own path into the work was unplanned. Early in his career, Razdan took an in-house role only to discover the company was being wound down. "[I] found out on my first day on the job and got thrown really directly into commercial litigation," he says, describing international contract disputes handled with no research tools or mentorship, on a simple brief: "Here [are] the problems. Figure out how to fix them." That start, he says, taught him to move quickly and trust his own judgment instead of waiting for direction. "The basic building blocks of managing AI responsibly come from the privacy structures that you've built in your organization," he says. "When you work with the ideas of privacy by design and transparency and getting the proper consents and managing those consents the correct way, you have the basic building blocks of managing an AI infrastructure as well." For lawyers building a career in technology law, his advice is to go deep rather than broad: "You really need to have an in-depth and intricate understanding of the technology rather than just … a passable understanding." And on AI in legal work: "Missing a word here or there, or missing a … clause here or there in a contract can be the difference of millions of dollars." LARA MERJANE Company: JBS USA Title: Corporate counsel AI AGENTS, CROSS-BORDER PRACTICE, AND THE VALUE OF UNDERSTANDING THE BUSINESS Artificial intelligence is useful only if you know how to ask the right question. "I think your prompt has to be something very well thought out and drafted," says Lara Merjane, corporate counsel at JBS USA. "One of the main instructions I gave was not to make anything up." Merjane has built Microsoft Copilot agents embedded in her company's contract playbooks – a practice that traces directly to her years at The Ross Firm Professional Corporation, a boutique spread across six small Ontario towns where the firm used AI to redline contracts well before most practices had considered it. Licensed in Brazil, Ontario, California, and Colorado, Merjane arrived at JBS USA in December 2025 with a foundation built across civil and common-law jurisdictions, a background in agricultural and corporate-commercial work, and hands-on experience with contract review automation. JBS USA is part of JBS N.V., the world's largest protein producer, with beef, pork, poultry, and leather operations spanning North America and beyond. Merjane's mandate covers all global procurement contracts across the group's entities, international logistics – air freight, ocean shipping, trucking, transloading, dry brokerage – IT agreements, some M&A, and responsibility for JBS Canada commercial matters. "I built Copilot agents that have the contract review functionality," she says. "So I put our playbooks into an agent." The system flags deviations from the company's standard positions. Two practical rules anchor her approach: the prompt must be precise and the tool must be told explicitly not to fabricate. "I also ask it to ask me questions if it's unsure about something," she says. Her advice for lawyers considering an in-house move: "The main homework that we have to do is to understand the business, understand all the business units, understand what you're selling, what you're purchasing, and what the leadership's goals are so you can adapt your advice to achieve … those goals." SAHIL RAZDAN Company: Samsung Electronics Canada Title: Senior legal counsel "The main homework that we have to do is to understand the business"