MLT Lawyers Practicing
in this Area Include:

Randy Brunet
Brad Vance
Deron Kuski
Mickey Woodard, Q.C.
Jonathan Troyer
Erin Breker

Recent developments in the privacy law area underscore the importance of ensuring that your organization's handling of personal information is legally compliant. Examples of such legal developments include the federal Personal Information and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), which is effective on January 1, 2004. Another Saskatchewan statute of note, The Health Information Protection Act (HIPA), came into effect on September 1, 2003.

MLT's Privacy Law team can help your organization navigate these new privacy laws and implement a plan to meet your privacy obligations.

Typically, there are three aspects to MLT's compliance services:

1. Information Gathering: A process by which we work with an organization to assess its current privacy and security position. MLT's methodology ensures minimal disruption to operations.

2. Gap Analysis: An assessment of the gap between current and recommended privacy and security practices. Existing and proposed third party contracts will be reviewed from a privacy and security perspective as part of this exercise.

3. Implementation: The development and implementation of a plan to bring the organization into compliance with applicable legal and policy requirements. This will typically involve:

• Drafting and assisting with the implementation of an internal privacy policy;
  
• Assisting with awareness training for management and staff;
  
• Drafting policies to guide the organization in publicizing its efforts to ensure privacy of information;
  
• Drafting consent mechanisms, as required, to support the organization's collection, use and disclosure of personal information;
  
• Revising, as required, standard confidentiality and data sharing agreements.

MLT recognizes that each organization's needs and capacity to dedicate internal resources to developing and implementing a privacy law compliance program will be unique. Our approach is to become an integral part of each organization's team and to seek out the most cost effective mix of MLT and internal resources to achieve the desired outcome. The key benefits of using MLT's privacy services are:

• Our extensive practical experience interpreting and applying a range of public, private, sectoral and organization-specific privacy legislation ensures a solution that is tailored to each client's individual circumstances.
  
• As a full-service, expertise-based law firm, MLT can efficiently provide legal advice in areas that commonly intersect with privacy law (for example, labour and employment law).
  
• Our gap analysis report and advice will be confidential and may be protected by the solicitor-client privilege.
  
• We seek to minimize our clients' costs by implementing programs that will allow our clients' teams to train their own people to deal with future privacy law issues and monitor their own compliance.