Proactive legal guidance to protect your business

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).

Yes. For companies in regulated industries — particularly startups and businesses expanding into new regulated areas — we build compliance programs from the ground up. This typically includes a written code of conduct, the foundational policies (data handling, anti-bribery, sanctions, conflict of interest, whistleblower, document retention, regulatory reporting), training programs, internal investigation procedures, escalation pathways, board-level reporting, and the ongoing monitoring infrastructure. Building it correctly the first time is significantly cheaper than retrofitting after a regulator inquiry.

Companies operating in both Canada and the United States face two parallel regulatory frameworks that often impose different and sometimes conflicting requirements. Cross-border compliance work involves identifying where the two regimes diverge (data privacy, anti-bribery, sanctions, employment, securities, sectoral regulation), building programs that satisfy both, and managing the additional layer of FCPA and CFPOA, OFAC and Canadian autonomous sanctions, and US-Canada information sharing under MLATs and similar instruments. Because Mayo Law is licensed in both jurisdictions, we handle this coordination inside one firm.

Yes. Many of our compliance clients use us as outside counsel to their internal compliance team — answering specific legal questions, reviewing draft policies, advising on novel regulatory issues, attending board or audit committee meetings, and providing legal cover for sensitive internal investigations. For companies without a full-time in-house compliance lawyer, this is an efficient way to access compliance counsel without the overhead of an in-house hire.

Regulator inquiries can range from informal information requests to formal investigations with subpoena power. The right response depends on the type of inquiry, the agency, the underlying conduct, and the company’s existing compliance posture. Defense counsel’s role typically includes preserving privilege, scoping the response, managing internal communications, coordinating document production, preparing witnesses, and where appropriate negotiating the scope of inquiry. We work with internal counsel and the board to develop the response strategy from the first contact.

Compliance work is preventive and proactive — designing programs and conducting audits so that conduct stays within the regulatory line. White collar defense is reactive — responding to allegations or investigations of specific conduct. The two practices intersect when an internal compliance investigation surfaces conduct that requires defense work, or when an external investigation reveals compliance program gaps that need remediation. Both practices live at Mayo Law, which is useful when both arms of work are needed on the same matter.