Canadian Lawyer InHouse

19 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE JANUARY 2016 Q Q Q Q munications team works hand in hand with my legal team to ensure the message we send out to the community is socially responsible, accurate, and fair. It's one of the reasons our CEO, Bert Clark, put these teams together under my leadership, because there are such synergies between our group in order to de- liver the best level of service to the organiza- tion and the public sector. He felt that with me overseeing procurement and legal and communications, it all links back together. It's one thing to be an excellent communica- tor, but a single sentence could get an organi- zation into a lot of trouble. What are some of your priorities when it comes to compliance issues? I am responsible for overseeing ethical issues and any wrongdoings with our employees or our bidders. I have a mandate to report to the board with respect to any whistleblower complaints and I am mandated to investigate every single one. The auditor general audit- ed our loans and AFP programs last year and they were chapters in her latest report. My legal, procurement, and communications team were deeply involved in that audit and we are preparing to respond to the recom- mendations in the auditor general's report. What's your philosophy to managing the in-house team? My internal team has a tremendous level of experience. I am really fortunate to have an opportunity to work with each one of them and each has a skill set that is Bay Street cali- bre. That is how I retain people – we don't have the luxury here of huge promotions and huge salaries. I am able to retain lawyers in my legal department because the experience they gain here at Infrastructure Ontario is experience they wouldn't get anywhere else. They have opportunities to build hospitals, highways, and detention centres, and work on the management of the second largest real estate portfolio in Canada [second to the federal government]. I have high expectations for the people I work with, but I wholeheartedly believe in balancing work and life. I was humbled and honoured to be the recipient of the Women's Executive Network Public Sector Leader Award this year. I see myself as being one member of a team and it's exciting others see I am an exceptional leader. I feel strongly about supporting women to have it all — it's a matter of picking your priorities. IH What are your top challenges for 2016? UrtheCast Corp. is a Vancouver-based Earth observation company that has been around for about fi ve years — it went public in June 2013. We are developing the world's fi rst Ultra HD colour video feed of Earth, streamed from the International Space Sta- tion. We also have a lower-resolution cam- era that takes fi ve-metre-resolution still pic- tures from space. We're a small company, but we have a lot of remote offi ces — one in Washington D.C., one in St. Louis, and in Vancouver, as well as two in Spain. We are very decentral- ized and, as a consequence, deal with a lot of international issues that come up. UrtheCast also owns and operates the De- imos-1 and Deimos-2 satellites through its Spanish subsidiary, operating as Deimos Im- aging. Video and still-image data captured by the cameras will be downlinked to ground stations across the planet and displayed on the UrtheCast web platform or distributed directly to partners and customers. Urthe- Cast's cameras will provide Ultra HD video and still imagery of Earth that will allow for monitoring of the environment, humanitar- ian relief, social events, agricultural land, and more. We're hoping to make it more avail- able to everyone and fi nd out all the useful applications for it — it could be for a number of business applications. The company is moving into an opera- tions mode in 2016 and that comes as a re- sult of our high-resolution video camera now being up and running. Before, we were in startup mode and now we're trying to get into an operational cadence. That will be a real focus for the company this year — to really drive sales and move forward with the recent acquisition in Spain. As the legal team, we're involved a lot in helping to drive revenue and help manage the sales pipeline and encourage faster onboarding of customers, which includes everything from sales agreements to due diligence. There is also a growth component that relates to the fact we have announced we are going to build our next-generation constellation — a 16-satellite constellation that will have synthetic aperture radar satellites — SAR — and optical imaging [satellites] fl ying together in tandem and communicating with each other. It's a system that really doesn't exist anywhere in the world yet. We're trying to get that funded through various customer initiatives and fi nding new partnerships. That is going to make up a lot of work for the legal team over the next while. Do regulatory issues apply to you? Yes, because sometimes taking pictures of things from space can be a sensitive subject. From a regulatory perspective, our depart- ment is responsible for everything involv- ing regulatory matters such as licensing of the various sensors we have in the sky that fl y on the satellites around the ISS. I think we're going to be busier in the licensing area because a lot of the licensing bodies are KIM STALLKNECHT CHRIS HOESCHEN Executive vice president, general counsel, UrtheCast Corp. Years as GC: 1.5 years Department: 3 lawyers

• Cover