Philippa Lawson is Executive Director and General Counsel of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law. From 1991 to 2003, she practiced administrative law and consumer advocacy with the Public Interest Advocacy Centre in Ottawa, Canada. During this period, Ms. Lawson represented consumer and public interest clients in all of Canada's major telecommunications regulatory proceedings; she has also appeared at all levels of the federal court system, including the Supreme Court of Canada. Ms. Lawson is a nationally recognized privacy advocate, and has worked with Canadian and international consumer organizations since the early 1990s on many privacy-related issues, including the regulation of Caller ID and telemarketing, the development and implementation of private sector data protection legislation, and online privacy generally. She is a member of the CSA Committee on the Model Privacy Code and Privacy International's Advisory Board. She is also a co-investigator/collaborator on the SSHRC-funded "On The Identity Trail" project (see www.idtrail.org), and is the lead investigator for the research project "Legal and Policy Approaches to Identity Theft" funded by the Ontario Research Network on Electronic Commerce (ORNEC).

As Director of Canada's only technology law clinic, Ms. Lawson's work focuses on training students in effective advocacy, producing relevant online resources, and ensuring that the public interest is robustly represented in government policy development and law-making processes on issues involving new technologies. She continues to be engaged in privacy-related research and advocacy from the public interest perspective, and is frequently quoted in the media on these issues.