Derek is an experienced business and technology lawyer, with more than twenty years' of legal practice advising directors, officers and managers on a wide range of Canadian legal, management and business issues. Derek has particular expertise in the software licensing, digital media, telecommunications and technology sectors, having worked with leading software vendors, web publishers, hardware suppliers, infrastructure managers, online advertisers, and Internet service providers to meet their business objectives amid the ever-changing rules and guidelines applied to digital products.
Most recently, Derek has been the Canadian in-house legal counsel for VMware, Inc., the silicon valley-based leader in developing and licensing software-defined datacenter software. Acting primarily as a transactions lawyer, Derek has been responsibile for:
advising company executives on Canadian law;
delivering and sustaining first-rate business deals with partners and customers; and
building policies and procedures to minimize systemic business risk.
Derek has been the chief legal officer, corporate secretary and director of privacy for AOL Canada, Canada's largest independent, national ISP. In that role, Derek handled the company's major telecommunications, web publishing, and online advertising contracts; managed a small team of legal professionals in advising executives; representing the company to regulators, industry groups, and government officials; and maintaining corporate records, and meeting corporate governance standards.
Prior to AOL Canada, Derek worked for several of Canada's most prominent business law firms, including McCarthy Tetrault and Fraser Milner Casgrain, advising technology companies, financial institutions, reporting issuers, underwriters and registrants on a wide variety of securities and ownership transactions, secured financings, corporate mergers and acquisitions, insolvency and debt restructurings.
Derek has obtained an M.B.A. from the Rotman School of Management of the University of Toronto, as well as a J.D from the University of Toronto Law School. He is a member of the Canadian Bar Association and the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association. Derek has also served on several boards and panels, including the Advisory Board to the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, the Canadian Coalition Against Internet Child Exploitation, and the Board of Directors of the Canadian Mental Health Association of Ontario. Derek has also spoken at conferences of the Canadian Marketing Association, particularly regarding online advertising.
Derek can be reached by confidential personal email at Derek@Rowsell.ca.
