Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
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INDUSTRY SPOTLIGHT on the cutting edge Biotech counsel Canada's biotechnology environment is ever-changing and moves lightning fast, say counsel involved in the industry. The legal departments are small and the regulatory developments are constant, but counsel say part of the enjoyment ultimately comes from doing work that helps people. By Helen Burnett in-house counsel working in small, publicly listed biotech com- panies, keeping up with the latest developments in securities law as well as the IP sector are also top of mind. For Leslie Dunlop, vice president and corporate counsel at I Bioniche Life Sciences Inc., a publicly traded, Belleville, Ont.- based biopharmaceutical company that "discovers, develops, manufactures, and markets proprietary products for human and animal health markets," a constant issue for her and her company is adhering to the many regulatory requirements of securities law, including the obligation to disclose material in- formation in a timely way. "For us, one of the major challenges we have is determining when a particular event or a piece of information is material and when it must be disclosed, and we often find that there's sort of an interesting intersection between the approach of the regulator and our needs as a publicly traded company to dis- close information," she says. In many cases, she says, the regulators consider these negotia- tions to be confidential and that, as no formal decision has been rendered, the information is not material. In a small company, there is a high shareholder focus on what the company is doing, and the definition of what might be ma- terial may be different than to a large company. "We find that we're often challenged to disclose things that C ANADIAN Lawyer INHOUSE JUNE 2008 35 n the cutting edge Canadian health biotechnology indus- try, research and development can hopefully make the transition to marketable product, bringing new challenges for everyone involved, including corporate counsel. Regulatory issues abound in this sector, and for many