David Young says it’s a compendium reference resource for lawyers trying to guide themselves through it
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The reason David Young decided to write a book on Canadian advertising and marketing law is a straightforward one — there was nothing in the marketplace that provided guidance on it.
“We wrote it for lawyers, and that is very much a guiding light,” says Young, co-author of Canadian Advertising and Marketing Law and a principal at David Young Law, a privacy and regulatory counsel practice. “It's a compendium reference resource for lawyers trying to guide themselves through it — it’s both an authoritative source of statute law and the case law.”
Although the motivation behind the substantial project was clear, the rules around this subset of corporate law are anything but. Young calls it a “regulatory matrix” that has become even more complicated than it was 30 years ago; and notes it’s significantly different than pure corporate law. While an epithet could be “misleading advertising law,” it goes way beyond that he says.
In the 80s, marketing and advertising was a subset of Young’s corporate practice that got to be quite significant in size. At first on his own, and then with his initial co-author, he started advising on the full scope of marketing law including product labelling and compliance.
“We put together an internal manual in our then-firm for our own purposes and provided it to a few clients, because there were so many rules,” says Young, now a sole practitioner doing almost exclusively privacy law with some limited corporate work.
This area of practice is a potentially litigious one, he notes, and despite a lawyer’s best efforts they often end up needing to know what the law is and reading whatever cases on the subject they can find. Canadian Advertising and Marketing Law, which was recently added to WestlawNext Canada’s new Corporate Commercial Texts and Annotations collection, offers a wealth of case law, as well as information on the statute or regulatory law. Lawyers can figure out what they should be considering with just a glance at the table of contents, Young says.
“There are so many diverse issues if you’re being asked to look at, let's say, a proposed marketing message for a particular product. Is it regulated? What's the guidance on that? I think that's the biggest pain point — what do I have to consider? — but there’s a huge diversity of pain points.”
Young says it’s interesting how the COVID-19 pandemic, which he has been weathering for the past several months on a farm in Collingwood, ON, “has jumped forward the digitization of all sorts of things.”
Although he’s no longer doing corporate contracts as much as he used to, this move to an increasingly digital environment has had some impact there and it intersects with a lot of what he’s been doing in the current climate.
“There's a huge overlap between privacy law and marketing law — if anyone has any sense of the Internet it basically covers both,” he says.
The pandemic is also raising a lot of privacy issues around return to work, as everything regarding the health condition of a person is potentially their private information “and the question is what's the tension between that private information and somebody else learning it other than your medical professional, and that's your employer?”
“This is hot now and it's going to be hot for at least six or nine months,” Young says. “It’s very cross-cutting. What is really intersecting and is a parallel hot topic is the whole issue of big data — it’s huge and has massive privacy issues.”
