Canadian Lawyer InHouse

39 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE JANUARY 2017 JOSEPH FRASCA KNOWS a thing or two about big journeys. The general counsel for tech e-commerce fi rm Shopify Inc got to its Ottawa-based offi ces via a circuitous route that took him from a tiny town in New Hampshire to Russia and the Czech Republic. Frasca grew up an hour north of Boston, in a small town where his father had worked as a lawyer for years. As such, the law was always at the back of Frasca's mind as a possible career, but he wanted to do it his own way. While he enjoyed small-town life, he was always driven by a desire to learn new things. "I had a pretty big desire from when I was young to get the hell out of New Hampshire, even though I love it," he says. This wanderlust would eventually lead him to the other side of the world. His high school offered a class in Russian. This was when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were locking horns. There was a mystique about Russia, and Frasca, an ardent James Bond fan, couldn't resist. A term spent in the former USSR when he was in high school entranced him, and he studied for a degree in Russian linguis- tics at university before heading back there to travel through Russia and the surround- ing countries. From there, he worked several jobs, spending time at an NGO and at an online newspaper during the dot-com boom. Eventually, though, he knew that he'd have to return to his studies. "I realized four years after university that having language skills wasn't quite enough to support a career in what I wanted to do, so I decided to go back to grad school," he says. Frasca studied at Boston University and Tufts, getting his masters in International Relations and Business, paired with a law degree. He started with visions of working in human rights law at The Hague, but as his studies went on, he became more interested in business and transactional law. When he fi nished his studies in 2004, this interest in business law landed him a position as an associate at law fi rm Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP. He also learned something important: the extent of P r o f e s s i o n a l P r o f i l e Embracing the role of trusted adviser Shopify general counsel is focused on providing constructive, creative advice in fast-moving world of e-commerce. BY DANNY BRADBURY Not only did I not know anything about the reinsurance business, but I'd never done due diligence before. JOSEPH FRASCA, Shopify

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