Technology
I read the contract and the system.
This is the page the rest of the practice is built around. A technology dispute usually turns on what a system actually did, and that question is normally answered to a neutral second-hand, by whichever expert is more fluent. I can read the primary material.
What comes up
The disputes.
Commercial technology matters between businesses. Vendor, customer, integrator and investor.
- Software contracts
- Failed implementations, scope and acceptance disputes, and the argument about whether the product was ever capable of the thing that was demonstrated.
- SLA and MSA breakdowns
- Availability and credit disputes, definitions of downtime that nobody checked against the monitoring, and termination-for-cause standoffs.
- Data residency and processing
- Where data actually sits, which sub-processors touch it, and whether the processing terms match the architecture that was built.
- AI vendor diligence
- Model performance against a warranted benchmark, training-data provenance, evaluation methodology, and what a model card does and does not say.
- IP and licensing
- Ownership of work product, open-source obligations, scope-of-licence and field-of-use disputes, and derivative-work arguments.
- Cloud and sub-processor
- Shared-responsibility gaps, migration and egress disputes, and outages whose cause sits one layer below the contracting party.
Why me
The claim is engineering practice, so let me state it as one.
I work as a machine-learning and infrastructure engineer. Not "technologically literate", not "familiar with the sector" — I build and operate these systems, now, not formerly.
What that buys a party is specific. An API trace, a set of monitoring dashboards, a model card, an evaluation harness, an architecture diagram and a data-processing addendum are all documents I can read directly. In a mediation that means the technical dispute can be tested in the room instead of deferred to an expert exchange that costs another quarter and often does not resolve it either.
It also means I can tell which technical disagreements are real. Some technology disputes are contract disputes wearing technical costume, and a neutral who cannot tell the difference will let a party spend heavily proving something that was never in issue.
The backdrop
What is actually in force, as of this page.
Named precisely, because this is the area where a confident wrong statement is easiest to make.
PIPEDA, still. The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act remains the federal private-sector privacy statute. Bill C-27, which would have enacted the Consumer Privacy Protection Act and the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act, died without royal assent when the session ended, and was not reinstated. A newer bill — C-36, for a Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act — was introduced in June 2026 and was at second reading when this page was written. Canada has no federal AI statute.
Ontario has one AI instrument, and it is mostly not switched on. The Enhancing Digital Security and Trust Act, 2024 conditions each of its artificial-intelligence obligations on regulations prescribing who they apply to and when. Two regulations have been made under it — one on cyber security, one on digital technology affecting people under 18 — and neither is the AI one.
And neither PIPEDA, nor Ontario's Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, nor its Personal Health Information Protection Act requires data to be stored in Canada. This is the one worth stating plainly, because data-residency clauses are often drafted against the opposite assumption. The federal Privacy Commissioner's own guidance says PIPEDA does not prohibit an organisation in Canada from transferring personal information to another jurisdiction for processing; what the Act requires instead is accountability — the organisation stays responsible for information it has transferred to a third party. Neither Ontario statute contains a storage-location rule either — FIPPA has no data-localisation provision, and PHIPA's "Disclosure outside Ontario" section is a disclosure permission rather than a rule about where records sit.
Which matters in a dispute because the parties are often arguing about a clause neither of them can point to a source for. Establishing what the obligation actually is, rather than what both sides assumed it was, frequently narrows the disagreement to something a mediation can close in a day.
Described as the state of the instruments, not applied to anyone's file. On residency the PIPEDA half is the federal Privacy Commissioner's own words; the Ontario half is what FIPPA and PHIPA say, and all three are named rather than described as a class. All of it is sourced in docs/reference/canada-privacy-technology.md and all of it can change — a bill at second reading in August 2026 is not a bill at second reading forever. What any of it means for a particular contract is a question for each party's own counsel.
The shape
Why these disputes suit a private process.
Confidentiality is not a preference here. The evidence in a technology dispute is source code, architecture, security posture and customer data flows. That is material neither side wants in a public record, and it is a reason parties choose arbitration over litigation before any question of speed arises.
The commercial relationship usually has to survive. A dispute with a vendor mid-implementation, or with a customer who is still live on the platform, is not a matter where either side can afford a two-year fight. Mediation, or med-arb with the switch agreed in advance, is built for exactly that shape.
And the process has to be able to look at the system. A documents-only arbitration works well where the dispute is about what the contract says. Where it is about what the system did, the process needs a way to get at the artefacts — which is a matter for the first procedural order, not something to discover late.
The process
And how it would run.
The area is the subject matter. The process is what the parties are choosing between, and each of these describes one — the formats, the rules, and what a party is expected to do and when.
Next step
Start with a call.
Tell me the shape of the matter and who is involved, and I will tell you whether I am the right neutral for it. Inquiries are answered within two business days.