Ryan Phillips

Ryan is the Managing Partner at JSS Barristers. He is an experienced advocate in commercial disputes and administrative law, including contractual interpretation, arbitration, construction, professional negligence and judicial reviews. Ryan has acted in many high stakes commercial and public law disputes throughout his career and brings a pragmatic approach to complex problems. 

Ryan has considerable experience in commercial arbitrations and a wide range of litigation at all levels of courts in Alberta, the Federal Court, the superior courts of British Columbia and Saskatchewan, and the Supreme Court of Canada. Ryan has been counsel for a variety of individuals, public and private companies, governments, and administrative bodies, including the Information and Privacy Commissioner in judicial reviews.

In 2023, Ryan was named Emerging Talent Alberta Litigator of the Year by Benchmark Litigation, and in 2024 he was recognized as a Litigation Star. Since 2020, Ryan has been named Future Star and included in Benchmark’s Top 40 & Under Litigator List. He is also recognized by Best Lawyers for his Corporate and Commercial Litigation Practice.
 

• Recently, Ryan was counsel for an intervener before the Supreme Court of Canada in the important privacy case of Facebook, Inc. v Privacy Commissioner of Canada. The case addresses issues of meaningful consent and security safeguards under federal privacy legislation in the context of social media and disclosure of personal information to third party apps.
  
• Ryan was co-counsel for the appellant in the landmark decision of Auer v Auer, 2024 SCC 36, which established the standard of review applied by courts to decisions made by the Executive branch of government and all regulations and rules made through the exercise of delegated powers. Auer is the leading precedent for judicial review of subordinate legislation and has already been cited over 150 times.
  
• In another important privacy case, Clearview AI Inc v Alberta (Information and Privacy Commissioner), 2025 ABKB 287, Ryan is co-counsel for the Information and Privacy Commissioner in a judicial review arising from a joint investigation into the internet scraping, collection, use and disclosure of billions of images by a U.S.-based technology company, which in turn is used to obtain facial recognition data and is sold for commercial purposes. This case addresses the tensions between privacy laws and freedom of expression, and is in some ways the sequel to Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta v United Food and Commercial Workers, 2013 SCC 62.
  
• In addition to contemporary administrative law matters, Ryan acts for several public and private companies in arbitrations and litigation, with a particular focus on disputes related to energy processing, infrastructure and transportation, and complex construction disputes for an international engineering firm.