Canadian Lawyer

FRONTIER THE GLOBAL NATURE OF BUSINESS TECHNOLOGIES ARE AND EMERGING EVOLUTION. JON FESTINGER FESTINGER LAW & STRATEGY LLP of businesses in the commercial satellite and space arena. The largely U.S.-based team will include Ottawa-based Dentons lawyer Kirsten Embree, head of the firm's communications law practice group. Embree maintains an extensive practice in telecommunications, broadcasting, digital media, and privacy law. Consider, too, San Francisco-based labour and employment law firm Littler Mendelson PC, which created a robotics, artificial intelligence, and automation practice group last October but with a view to how those technologies will impact the labour market. According to firm chairman Garry Mathiason, by 2025 half of the jobs currently performed in the United States will be per- formed by machines and software. He predicts this will introduce labour law issues such as work- place privacy, anti-discrimination protections, wage and hour requirements, human displace- ment, and collective bargaining requirements, among others. He spoke on a panel with in-house counsel in Toronto last June, exploring the emerging global challenges facing in-house counsel. Mathiason talked about "Sophie," a robot that is a product of NEC Corp. and La Trobe University Business School, which is designed to pre-screen job candidates and record the con- versation while also noting the applicant's cognitive verbal responses and monitoring changes in facial expression, blood pressure, heart rate, and more. "You should be hearing a lot of landmines going off in the legal department over this," said Mathiason, noting the plentiful privacy issues involved. The demands of rapidly growing technology platforms are also bringing practice areas together that might never have intermingled before. Canadian Lawyer takes a look at some of the changing, growing, and emerging areas of legal practice today. ELECTRONIC COMMERCE/MOBILE WALLET F irms like Blake Cassels & Graydon LLP are seeing increasing collaboration of their spe- cialists in the areas of financial services, regulatory, and technology. Customer-facing innovations such as mobile wallet require lawyers from different practice groups to work together. This month, Blakes partners Jacqueline Shinfield and Parna Sabet-Stephenson will present as part of a panel on the challenges of mobile wallet at the Association of Corporate Counsel annual meeting. "We have to work together so closely now," says Sabet-Stephenson who specializes in outsourcing, technology law, and e-commerce. "In the past, we were per- haps considered separate areas of practice and working parallel but now Jackie keeps abreast of developments in my field and I have to do the same with hers to provide the useful advice clients are looking for. We have to have knowledge that goes beyond our own practice areas." Shinfield, who is focused on regulatory compliance in the retail financial services and payments industry, has acted for wallet providers, program managers, and issuers whose products are going into wallets to make sure they have the proper security measures and disclosures. "Depending on who you are acting for in the wallet the things you are looking for have different importance," she says. DRIVING LAW PRACTICE mArK BrENNAN BY JENNIFER BROWN

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