Jessica Foster

About Jessica Foster

Jessica Foster is a partner in Gowling WLG's Infrastructure and Construction Group in Toronto. Public bodies, developers, contractors and manufacturers come to Foster for help on major construction and infrastructure work, and that help can start at the earliest planning stage and carry on until a project's finished. It's often the moment when a procurement plan is shifting, a commercial relationship is still forming, or the familiar approach just won't work that clients pick up the phone.

Before moving into private practice, Foster held senior legal roles at Infrastructure Ontario and Aon. As a Director in the Transaction Legal group at Infrastructure Ontario, Foster advised on the procurement and implementation of major public projects under both traditional and alternative delivery models, and led the drafting and negotiation of public-private partnership deals, design-build project agreements and consulting contracts. That work touched the New Toronto Courthouse, the Finch West LRT, the Scarborough Subway Extension's advance tunnel and West Lincoln Memorial Hospital. At Aon, the focus turned to project risk: sitting down with brokers, insurers and clients to size up serious exposures and build insurance strategies around them.

Foster makes a point of starting with what the client wants to achieve, not with legal analysis or a first draft, and a simple question frames that approach: what does success look like? Legal and insurance thinking meet again in From Bids to Bricks, a webinar series Foster co-chairs with Kyle David of Aon that's now in its second annual run. Foster has also written about Ontario's Buy Ontario directives for public sector and municipal procurement.

Called to the Ontario bar in 2011 and to the Alberta bar in 2026, Foster studied law at Western University after earning a sport management degree at Brock.