Companies operating in both Canada and the United States face two parallel regulatory frameworks that often impose different and sometimes conflicting requirements. These guides cover audits, program design, sanctions, privacy and what happens when a regulator opens an inquiry.
A compliance lawyer helps companies build, audit, and maintain programs that ensure their operations satisfy applicable regulatory requirements — at the federal, state or provincial, industry, and international levels. Day-to-day work includes designing internal policies and procedures, conducting compliance audits, training staff, advising on novel regulatory questions, responding to regulator inquiries, and acting as outside counsel for compliance teams that need legal support but don’t need a full-time in-house lawyer.
Our compliance practice serves clients across healthcare, financial services, technology, manufacturing, and other regulated industries. The specific regulatory framework varies by industry — HIPAA and PHIPA for healthcare data, AML and KYC for financial services, data privacy and consumer protection for technology, product safety and trade compliance for manufacturing — but the core work of compliance program design, audit, training, and ongoing counsel applies across all of them.
A compliance audit reviews how a company’s actual operations measure against the applicable regulatory framework. Typical components include policy and procedure review, transaction and document sampling, employee interviews, control testing, gap analysis against the relevant statutes and regulations, and a written report identifying findings and recommended remediation. Audits can be scheduled (annual or quarterly) or triggered by specific events (regulator inquiry, M&A diligence, internal report of misconduct, change in regulatory landscape).