Heather Cohen’s work at the Ontario Securities Commission sees her focused on securities law, although other areas of law can unexpectedly become relevant to her work and her volunteer experience had also sparked an interest in studying tax law more closely. When she began considering an LLM, she wanted room to pursue those different interests rather than limiting her studies to a single field.
Osgoode’s Professional LLM in General Law gave Heather the flexibility to build a course of study across multiple areas. She initially focused on securities and tax, then added courses from the business law stream as other subjects caught her attention.
“It gives you the opportunity to build your own LLM in up to three different areas of law,” she says.
Heather’s career has similarly taken her across different areas of practice and professional environments. Before joining the OSC, she worked in commercial litigation, international human rights and public-interest law, including roles with non-profits and the United Nations. Corporate accountability and securities regulation have been recurring interests throughout that career, and subjects she encountered in earlier roles sometimes resurface in her work today.
Within the LLM, Heather chose courses partly by looking at subjects she encountered professionally and partly by following areas she wanted to explore further. Conversations with peers and professors also influenced her choices. Among her favourites was Kenneth Jull’s Corporate and Financial Crimes and Compliance course, alongside tax courses with Professor Jinyan Li and John Tobin.
Her securities courses let Heather pull back from the detail of her daily work and think more broadly. She took Professor Mary Condon’s Securities Law – Theoretical Approaches course and found herself returning to the theory underlying a field in which she was already deeply immersed professionally.
“It was just fascinating, getting back to the theory of securities law since I’m generally quite in the weeds in my day-to-day,” she says.
As Associate Vice President, Markets at the OSC, Heather leads a team that oversees marketplaces operating in Ontario and works on related policy. Those marketplaces range from traditional exchanges such as the Toronto Stock Exchange to crypto asset trading platforms, placing her close to changes in both markets and technology.
“One thing that I love about my job is, again, continuous learning because the markets are always changing and the technology is always moving very quickly,” she says.
The LLM also gave Heather opportunities to take some of her interests beyond the classroom. With support from professors she worked with during the program, she published two pieces in the tax field and another related to whistleblowers, building on subjects she had explored through her studies.
Heather’s preference for learning across subject areas goes back to her undergraduate degree at McMaster University, which gave her the chance to study a wide range of subjects. Years later, she found a similar breadth in the General Law LLM, one that matched the varied interests she has pursued throughout her career.
“It has really helped shape the way I practice tax litigation today,” she says. “I got to think about tax in a way I had never thought about before.”
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