Using artificial intelligence to make public education more efficient while protecting people's privacy and supporting Sheridan’s institutional mission, is not an abstract policy debate at Sheridan College; it is a series of daily judgments, Rose Sharifi says, with real consequences for students, staff and the institution’s future.
As general counsel and AVP at Sheridan, Sharifi leads a compact in-house team that provides legal services information management, and privacy advice. “Every day is different. And you really have to be a generalist in order to be successful in this role, understanding the nuances of the sector,” she says. Her office navigates shifting regulatory expectations and funding constraints while resisting the temptation to treat a public college like a conventional business. Instead, her focus is ensuring that legal strategy reflects an educational mission.
Early in her career, Sharifi worked at Donnell Law Group, north of Newmarket, running a general litigation practice that exposed her to criminal defence, civil and estate disputes, and employment and human rights matters. On her first solo appearance as an articling student, she recalls being sent to seek what she now knows was a routine adjournment. “I remember attending court, not knowing which side of the room to stand on and how to address the justice of the peace at the time,” she says. The experience as a litigator forced her to get comfortable with pressure, think quickly on her feet and prepare for the unexpected.
Litigation, she says, “helped me understand what would happen when it came to the consequences of decisions that I would be making in-house.” Seeing what happens when ambiguous contract language or clumsy employment decisions are tested in court gave her a vivid sense of what is at stake when she would be asked to sign off on institutional choices. After several years in court, she wanted to move closer to those choices themselves. A maternity-leave contract at grocery retailer Longo’s offered an inside view of how a fast-moving business made decisions long before anything reached a courtroom. Fractional roles through Axiom allowed her time to become licensed in California, broadened her exposure to different organizations, and ultimately led to a six-month assignment with Sheridan. The secondment quickly turned into a permanent move; she joined as an associate general counsel in August 2022 and became an AVP, general counsel, in June 2025.
Today, her mandate ranges across much of the legal terrain that defines a modern public college. She advises everyone from Sheridan’s leadership to staff across the institution who have questions about compliance, including working with legislation such as the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the Personal Health Information Protection Act, and the Occupational Health and Safety Act. She operates in a unionized environment with three collective agreements, where the consequences of legal advice are often measured in terms of jobs, workloads, and working conditions rather than in abstract risk matrices.
The financial pressures on the post-secondary sector turn many of those files into human resource decisions. These pressures are also pushing colleges to look for new sources of revenue. At Sheridan, that means turning more systematically to the intellectual property generated on campus. Sharifi’s task is to help design structures that capture some of that value without undermining the institution’s status as a not-for-profit, charitable organization or compromising its academic priorities.
AI now sits squarely at the junction of these practical and ethical concerns. On one hand, there are a clear opportunity for AI tools to streamline work, reduce administrative burdens and stretch thin resources. “The adoption of AI in the sector is interesting because from an institutional perspective, we’re obviously looking at it in terms of how to make work more efficient for the workforce on a day-to-day,” she says. Sheridan must also prepare students “for a world which increasingly relies on AI use,” including in creative and arts programs where technology has not traditionally been central. At the same time, Sheridan recognizes the need to ensure privacy protections and institutional oversight.
To support a holistic, coordinated response, the college has launched an internal AI committee that is mapping available tools, gauging comfort levels, and building buy-in in an environment where capabilities, risks, and expectations are evolving on a day-to-day basis. Expectations for AI use at Sheridan are guided by values set out in guidelines for the responsible use of generative AI, first published in 2023.
For Sharifi, AI is not just a policy topic. It is already in use in her own office. “We currently use Microsoft Copilot at Sheridan. And so that’s been a fantastic resource just to get a baseline when it comes to creating templates to provide a foundation,” she says. The tool, like other AI tools, can help in-house lawyers spend more time on judgment and less on boilerplate.
Inside the legal department, leadership is defined less by titles than by how she steers people through uncertainty. “I think leadership is about listening and providing whatever certainty you can during times of change,” she says. That means being frank about institutional and sector-wide constraints while still investing in her staff’s development.
To provide additional capacity, external counsel functions as an extension of her office. Sheridan relies on outside firms for labour and employment work such as grievances and arbitrations, but Sharifi judges those relationships more on responsiveness and sector understanding than on brand. In a college environment where things are, fast-paced, she values advisers she can “call up and run an idea by” without waiting a week for a formal opinion.
For lawyers in private practice who are contemplating a move in-house, she is clear that technical skill alone is no longer a differentiator. “Investing in judgment just as much as investing in technical skill is important,” she says, because in-house clients regularly ask for advice when the facts are incomplete. She also emphasizes the importance of relationships, both inside and outside the organization. Over the years, she has built “a network of lawyers who I can call when I have challenges to talk through issues,” and she adds that even senior counsel needs that kind of sounding board.
Underpinning her approach to law and leadership is a personal story about what education can do. Her parents immigrated to Canada from Afghanistan in the early 1990s, leaving behind their medical careers amid political turmoil. She says they attribute their survival in a new country to education and to “the ability to navigate a complex social system.” Working at a college that helps the next generation acquire those same tools is not an accident. Supporting “the next generation of students,” even from a non-student-facing role, aligns directly with “who I am, where I come from, and what values my parents instilled in me,” she says, and that alignment gives shape to the hard choices that now land on her desk.
The views reflected in this article are Rose Sharifi’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Sheridan College.