Shannon Uhera

About Shannon Uhera

Shannon Uhera helps businesses market themselves within the rules. Working out of Gowling WLG's Toronto office as an associate in the Intellectual Property Group, Uhera concentrates on advertising and marketing law: reviewing ad copy, designing and vetting contests, and putting together influencer, sponsorship and co-promotion arrangements. The advice tracks both provincial and federal requirements, for clients in fields like retail, financial services, alcohol and telecom.

Uhera's time at the firm goes back to student days, first for a summer and then through articling, before an Ontario call in 2018. That same year came a secondment to a beverage company, where the work took in advertising, business and IP questions. Since then, Uhera's spent part of the week seconded to a banking client of the firm and, separately, to the marketing compliance team at a Canadian food and drug retailer.

There's a steady stream of writing and speaking, too. With firm colleagues, Uhera has written on greenwashing risk under the amended Competition Act and on the Competition Bureau's draft guidelines for environmental claims, plus a 2023 overview of how contests are regulated in Canada. On a 2022 Gowling WLG webinar about ambush marketing, Uhera's part of the discussion looked at how event sponsors can protect their rights.

IP was already a thread in law school. In the final year at Windsor Law, the JD included a practicum at the International Intellectual Property Law Clinic and a place on the team sent to the Oxford international IP moot, which made the oral rounds and took third for its written submissions. Before that came a Master of Information from the University of Toronto and a BA from Western, where Uhera received the gold medal for Top Bachelor of Arts, Four Year (Major).