"Not a lot of people in the Canadian legal space understand the nuances of specialty pharmacy business and specialty distribution business in Canada," says John Greiss, chief legal officer at Sentrex Health Solutions. It is a gap that, for nearly two decades, he has been uniquely positioned to fill – first as a practising pharmacist, then as a lawyer who built his career around the pharmaceutical supply chain.
From pharmacy counter to legal career
Greiss grew up in a family of pharmacists, and the profession offered a more natural entry point as he weighed career options. "My mom owns a pharmacy and had run a family business for a while, and it just felt like the most natural transition at that time. I didn't know anyone in law," he says. When he eventually pursued his Juris Doctor at the University of Alberta, he was already a relief pharmacist – locum shifts gave him the scheduling flexibility to fund his studies. "I was able to intertwine the two together and pay my way," he says, "so that I didn't have to come out with too much debt."
A young family and the income gap between a junior lawyer and an experienced pharmacist kept him in pharmacy for several more years after graduating. The move into legal roles came through the Pharmaceutical Advertising Advisory Board (PAAB), the quasi-regulatory body that works closely with Health Canada and holds significant influence over pharmaceutical marketing and advertising in Canada. PAAB recruited him initially as a pharmacist, with a planned transition to legal counsel – "a perfect blend of pharmaceutical expertise and knowledge as well as the regulatory and governance piece," he says, that he had been looking to develop. That background drew Norton Rose Fulbright, which needed someone versed in the regulatory framework for pharmaceutical, medical device, and natural health product clients, and later Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt, before he made the in-house move to Sentrex.
Building a legal infrastructure to match the growth
Sentrex had been a client. It was growing fast, and its legal function needed to scale alongside it. "That was a great challenge and a great opportunity," he says. When Greiss arrived as general counsel, Sentrex had a small contract-based legal team supporting the business, and there was significant room to build out more formal infrastructure as the company expanded. He has since built a privacy team to handle the personal health information Sentrex processes, a contracts management function to support the volume of agreements the business generates, and has recently brought corporate secretary and governance work in-house. "It does feel like you're building the airplane as it's flying," he says. The hours have not decreased: "I'm not working fewer hours than I was in private practice." Litigation and employment matters continue to flow to external counsel while recruiting continues.
AI governance in a patient data environment
AI governance sits near the top of his priority list, shaped by the company's exposure to patient data. A pattern has emerged in which colleagues use approved AI tools to draft general business materials, then bring that work to legal, expecting a quick sign-off – only to get the opposite result. "If AI is not used properly, it ends up leading to more work, more review and longer times," he says. The team has established that legal work should stay with the legal team, using AI to move faster within that function. The AI use policy is, by his own description, constantly evolving, with legal and privacy teams embedded in the governance committee to evaluate new tools before they’re approved for use. Roles with less exposure to patient data – IT development, marketing – operate within a broader set of approved use cases, while any work involving personal health information is subject to strict controls and excluded from general-purpose AI tools. The Quebec regulator's active scrutiny of specialty pharmacy adds a separate layer of rigour.
What in-house practice actually demands
What surprised him most was how much information management matters alongside legal risk – and how it takes much more than industry knowledge to do well. The deeper challenge was communicating across that gap. "Distilling down the legal concepts into a business-friendly approach and making it understandable for the business so that they understand what you are flagging and why has been and continues to be a challenge," he says. "If you're not communicating across what those risks are … it just gets lost, and people don't take the advice very seriously, and management just dismisses it as something that's too theoretical or too remote for them to consider."
On working with external counsel, his advice is clear: ask more questions, make fewer assumptions. "If external counsel doesn't make assumptions and instead comes and asks for the questions or asks for the details and gets to understand what the problem is, the more they do that, the more valuable their advice ends up being," he says.
For lawyers weighing an in-house move, Greiss pushes back on a common assumption – that the most demanding legal work stays in private practice. "So many interesting questions and so many interesting legal problems arise in the day-to-day, and there just isn't time to engage external counsel," he says. "As in-house counsel, you're having to make those decisions with sometimes not all the information, or you're having to go out and do all the digging and to assess the risk and de-risk the situation as much as possible. And I think that's an exciting way to practise law," he says. The early adjustment is uncomfortable – "you definitely start to feel like a junior lawyer again initially" – but it passes. "You start to build the muscles, and with enough reps, you start to get a better feel of where the risks and the issues are." The analysis is not short-circuited; it is done faster, often on personal time.
John Greiss is a member of the Canadian Lawyer Leaders Network.
More profiles of in-house lawyers across Canadian industries and sectors are published weekly on Lexpert.