Brendan Jon Van Niejenhuis

Brendan van Niejenhuis advises and represents clients facing serious disputes, regulatory exposure, and institutional complexity — matters that arrive with unfamiliar terrain, formidable counterparties, or consequences that will outlast the proceeding itself. His practice spans public law, commercial litigation, class actions, intellectual property enforcement, securities and regulatory matters, and First Nations litigation, among other fields. The work turns on the character of the problem, not the category of law.

He has served as senior counsel to the Government of Canada — advising at the highest levels of government — in two of the country’s most prominent recent commissions of inquiry: the Public Order Emergency Commission, examining the invocation of the Emergencies Act during the 2022 convoy protests and border blockades, and the Foreign Interference Commission, examining foreign interference in Canada’s democratic institutions. He represented the Privacy Commissioner of Canada in the federal enforcement proceeding against Meta arising from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, prosecuted major securities frauds for the Ontario Securities Commission, and has acted for First Nations communities, financial institutions, municipalities, police services, professional regulators, and individuals in circumstances demanding both sophistication and discretion. He is a security-cleared Special Advocate available in national security and intelligence matters, and is cross-appointed as litigation counsel to PCK IP, a leading Canadian intellectual property firm.

Some of his most significant mandates never reach a courtroom or surface publicly. While many matters arrive with the need to respond to a legal proceeding, Brendan is often engaged when the contours of a problem are still emerging and the exposure is indeterminate — where the client’s interests are best served by anticipation rather than force, and the measure of success is that the problem recedes rather than escalates.