Osgoode’s advanced procurement law certificate fills a gap in the industry

Osgoode’s brand new Certificate in Advanced Procurement Law and Practice fills a gap in an evolving field, according to its co-program director Rosslyn Young.

Young, an alumna and advisory board member of Osgoode’s existing Certificate in Public Procurement Law: The Rules in Practice, explains that the longstanding program provides an exceptional foundation for lawyers and other professionals new to the area.

But until now, she says procurement professionals had few options to dive deeper into the subject.

“Knowing the public procurement process is table stakes for people just starting out or lawyers who occasionally work in the area,” she says.

“For those who live and breathe public procurement, this new program will allow them to look at what they already know and take it up a notch,” adds Young, who leads the new advanced certificate with co-program director Marilyn Brown.

Candidates enrolled in the new program would be hard pressed to find anyone better suited to co-direct it than Young, who has spent her entire career straddling the worlds of public procurement and commercial law.

Young got her first exposure to public procurement law soon after her 2006 call to the bar, while in private practice at a mid-sized Toronto boutique firm with several school board clients.

“It’s a very niche area of the law and everything unfolded from there,” she says.

Young then switched between various roles in-house and in private practice before accepting a position and settling at one of her former clients, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.  

Over the next five years, Young says the Crown agency was a great place to work, even if the perks of the job fell short of her friends’ and family’s expectations:

“People always wanted to know if I got any freebies, but I had to line up in the store with everyone else for my bottles of wine,” Young says.

More importantly, the LCBO provided Young with a professional turning point when she was seconded to lead its procurement department.

“From a career perspective, it was the point when I went from being a sole contributor to a business leader,” she says. “I stopped practising law, but my training as a lawyer was essential to the way that we transformed how the department operated.”

After performing a similar transformation of the procurement functions at Ontario transportation agency Metrolinx, Young was tempted back to the LCBO as its chief legal officer, where she brought her business leadership approach to its legal department.

Earlier this year, she took the latest step in her hybrid career journey, taking on the role of chief legal officer at Supply Ontario, a Crown agency established at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic with an ambitious goal to centralize and strengthen the province’s domestic supply chain, while also streamlining procurement processes across government and the broader public service, through a lens of innovation and modernization.

Young says the agency’s broad mandate was part of the reason she found the position so attractive.

“I am passionate about public procurement. There’s a lot of room to do better: the process is often too bureaucratic and there is a lot of unnecessary miscommunication between vendors and public sector organizations that ends up costing government,” she says. “I’ve seen it from many different perspectives and this role allows me not only to continue my own growth, but also to give back and really make a difference for taxpayers.”

As well as offering legal advice to Supply Ontario itself, Young advises on contracts for goods and services used by many of the government agencies and organizations that fall within the broader public service.

“We take this huge government spend and find ways to capitalize on that purchasing power, so that government entities can focus on their core mandates,” she says.

Young’s involvement with the Certificate in Advanced Procurement Law extends her already-deep connections to Osgoode. Aside from her role with the foundational Osgoode Certificate in Public Procurement Law, she has also completed the Osgoode Certificate in Construction Law. 

“What really attracted me to Osgoode’s certificate programs is that they are so practical. You come away with having learned stuff that you can actually use in your day-to-day work,” she says.

The inaugural Advanced Certificate – which runs online over four days in December – will continue in that tradition, Young adds, noting that the legal updates and practical strategies are ideal for legal, procurement and public sector professionals with more than five years of experience in the field.

“Teaching is something that’s near and dear to my heart. For lawyers, I want them to rethink their role in public procurement and consider how they can work in a way that adds more value to the process,” she says. “I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts.”