Professor Martin Petrin

Professor Martin Petrin’s approach to corporate law has been shaped by a career that spans New York, Switzerland, Singapore, and London. Working across these major legal and financial centres taught Professor Petrin, as he puts it, “humility about legal solutions and the importance of having an open mind.” Engaging with different regulatory approaches revealed that business law rarely offers a single, universally correct answer. “Often, there’s not one ‘right’ answer to business law and governance questions,” Professor Petrin explains. “Context matters, so what might work well in one jurisdiction might not work, or needs to be tweaked, for other parts of the world.”

This comparative sensibility sits at the centre of Professor Petrin’s teaching philosophy. In the classroom, he encourages students to question assumptions and understand Canadian corporate law within a broader global legal landscape. “I don’t just teach doctrine abstractly,” he says. His practice background – advising clients on governance, mergers and acquisitions, private equity, and liability – frequently shapes his courses through real-world examples, transactional problems, and negotiation exercises built from actual deal documents. “When I teach mergers and acquisitions,” he notes, “I usually incorporate a student negotiation exercise based on real-world agreements and documents.” For Professor Petrin, the aim is to blend conceptual understanding with the skills-based reasoning that business lawyers rely on every day.

Professor Petrin joined OsgoodePD recently and describes being “genuinely thrilled” to co-direct the LLM in Business Law alongside Professor Poonam Puri. What drew him to the role was the opportunity to contribute to a program that is already exceptionally strong. “The opportunity to join a program that’s already in very strong shape – well-established and well-run, popular among students, and recognized as a leading Professional LLM in Canada and abroad – was incredibly appealing.” Rather than rebuilding, Professor Petrin sees the work ahead as enhancing and expanding. “We now have the exciting challenge of taking something already excellent and making it even better,” he says. “We’re looking at some exciting additions to the program in the months to come that will further enhance our offerings and continue to strengthen the practical and career-focused aspects that define the Professional LLM.”

Professor Petrin is also energized by OsgoodePD’s position at the heart of Canada’s legal and financial capital. “Our location in Canada’s legal and financial capital combined with OsgoodePD’s reputation and academic standing, creates unique opportunities for both research-led teaching and experiential learning with industry engagement,” he notes. “I’m excited to contribute and be part of the team that delivers and develops this unique program for the benefit of our students.”

A major thread running through Professor Petrin’s research is the impact of emerging technologies – particularly artificial intelligence – on corporate governance and regulation. He began studying this area nearly a decade ago, long before the recent surge in machine learning and generative AI. “At the time, this seemed quite futuristic – people were skeptical about whether AI could ever meaningfully participate in corporate decision-making,” he recalls. “Now, with advances in machine learning and generative AI, these questions have become entirely credible and urgent.”

Professor Petrin’s current work examines how AI is reshaping corporate structures, decision-making hierarchies, and the nature of the firm itself. Another strand of his research considers how lawyers may use AI to transform transactional work, as well as questions of accountability when increasingly autonomous systems cause harm. “Traditional corporate law assumes human decision-makers whose actions or omissions can be attributed to the legal entity for which they act,” Professor Petrin explains. “But when AI systems act increasingly autonomously, such as in the coming wave of agentic AI tools, our existing frameworks struggle. Who’s responsible when an algorithm causes economic or even bodily harm?” Concepts like foreseeability, causation, fiduciary oversight, and the business judgment rule become harder to apply in this new context. What makes the work particularly compelling for Professor Petrin is its immediacy: “These aren’t just theoretical puzzles. Companies are deploying AI at scale right now.”

This summer, Professor Petrin will bring many of these questions into his Advanced Corporate Law course. Although the structure is still being finalized, he sees the course as an opportunity to delve into issues surrounding the corporation that often fall outside introductory courses. He plans to explore timely topics such as the influence of institutional investors, the relationship between board authority and technological change, and evolving debates about corporate purpose. “I’m approaching it as an opportunity to go deeper on some foundational issues surrounding the corporation that are not usually covered in basic courses,” Professor Petrin explains. He also expects the course to help students connect the various strands of corporate law they encounter elsewhere, giving them “the theoretical underpinnings and a bird’s-eye view of different topics and how they connect.” True to his comparative background, Professor Petrin will examine how different jurisdictions tackle similar challenges, centring Canadian and Anglo-American law while incorporating civil-law perspectives where appropriate.

Ultimately, Professor Petrin hopes that his international career allows him to “use a broader lens” in training lawyers who will go on to advise multinational clients and contribute meaningfully to policy debates. It is a perspective shaped by comparison, grounded in practice, and deeply attuned to how rapidly the field of corporate law is evolving.