Law Times

Law Times • JuLy 11, 2016 Page 9 www.lawtimesnews.com Practice area industry-oriented Food law grows across Canada BY MICHAEL MCKIERNAN For Law Times F ood was a passion long before it was a legal prac- tice for Glenford Jameson. "I worked in a kitchen before I had a social insurance number," says Jameson, a Toron- to food lawyer. Ever since, Jameson has found a way to work his favou- rite subject into his professional life, making money in the hos- pitality industry and writing law school papers about insurance in the perishable food sector. Despite articling at a full ser- vice business law firm, "I still touched a lot of files with food specifics," Jameson says, pin- pointing his spell as adviser to the Ontario Food Trucks As- sociation as the first occasion in which he managed to truly in- tegrate his passion into his bur- geoning career in legal practice. Now, as the founder and principal of a law firm devoted to food matters, the combina- tion is complete. G.S. Jameson and Company represents clients across the spectrum of Canada's food system: from the farm to the fork, and all points in between. Because food law as a practice area is more industry-oriented than other traditional special- isms such as employment law or family law, Jameson says he and other food lawyers need to have a broad range of legal skills in their lockers. "For me, it made a lot of sense to get away from a siloed prac- tice area and start to look at how stakeholders interact with one another," he says. Sara Zborovski, a Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP partner who tweets (@thefood- lawyer) and blogs online as The Food Lawyer, says the concept of a lawyer who specializes in food has only recently begun to take off in Canada. Her own practice has more of a regula- tory slant to it — assisting clients with issues such as food label claims and new product approv- als, all of which are overseen by Health Canada. "Food law can mean differ- ent things to different people. For some commercial lawyers, they will say they practice it be- cause their clients tend to be food companies. For me, I talk about it in the context of regu- latory law, and one regulator in particular: Health Canada. I do help companies with things like commercial agreements, but most often it's under the regula- tory umbrella; how do we ensure the agreement makes sense in the light of regulatory require- ments," she says. "We're certainly seeing a lot more lawyers coming out and labelling themselves as food lawyers. They're thinking about how their clients see themselves, and attuning their own brand- ing to that," Toronto-based Zborovski adds. But it wasn't always that way. For a long time, Ronald Doering plowed a lonely furrow on the Canadian food law scene, first applying the label to his practice in the 1990s as a government lawyer at Agriculture Canada. "I'm pretty sure I was the first food lawyer in Canada," Doering says. He went on to help draft the legislation that created the Ca- nadian Food Inspection Agency in 1997, and then served as the agency's first president. By the time Doering retired from public service in 2002, he was still virtually alone in Ca- nadian food law, but his solitary status worked to his advantage when he switched to private practice at Gowling WLG. As one of the few Canadian law- yers involved with the Food and Drug Law Institute, a group based in the U.S., where food lawyers have a much longer his- tory, he got "a lot of referrals." In one paper for the institute, he reminded U.S. lawyers that Canada was not the 51 st state, outlining the plethora of differ- ences between the two jurisdic- tions when it comes to regula- tions on labelling, additives, and packaging, among others. "Big companies would of- ten get into trouble when they started selling products that had met the U.S. standards, and just presumed that would be good enough to sell them in Canada," Doering says. "Once word got around that a former president of the regulator was now avail- able to help in Canada, a lot of people got in touch." Canadian companies, too, turned to Doering early on, helping him develop a niche in product recalls. "I ended up helping compa- nies on nearly all the large ones I can think of in the last 20 years," he says. "I did dozens of them when I was a regulator, so I know how complicated it can be on the evening when you make a deci- sion on whether or not to order one. The science is important but rarely determinative. There are a lot of tough calls." Jameson says choice is grow- ing for food businesses as food law develops. "There has been a shift in consumers of legal services, de- manding that lawyers under- stand their business, and not just the law," he says. His own back- ground in food before law has also helped Jameson bond with clients, he says. "There are cultural norms that come with working in the industry, so I think there is an appreciation that I understand what they are trying to convey. "When you can use vernacu- lar they know, it helps when you're trying to translate to the particular language of contract," he says. LT FOCUS Glenford Jameson has founded a law firm devoted to food matters. © 2016 Thomson Reuters Canada Limited 00238CY-70265-CE Drafting Assistant – Transactional also: • Flags discrepancies in defined terms, numbering, punctuation, and non- conforming phrases • Hyperlinks those flagged issues, allowing you to navigate to the exact location within your documents • Links key concepts such as cited sources and defined terms • Scans your document and quickly connects to other documents referenced in the transaction With Drafting Assistant – Transactional, you'll expedite the document review process and spend more time tackling the substantive, client-specific issues that matter most. 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