John D. Gregory retired in 2016 as General Counsel in the Justice Policy Development Branch, Ministry of the Attorney General (Ontario). After clerking for the Chief Justice of Canada, he was called to the Ontario Bar in 1977. He practised commercial law in Toronto with Wright & McTaggart until 1985, when he joined the provincial government.

With the Justice Policy Development Branch, John developed policies on - among many other topics - alternative dispute resolution, private international law, trade law and provincial offences, including the electronic filing rules for photoradar speeding tickets.

John's role often took him beyond Ontario's borders. He served as president of the Uniform Law Conference of Canada and was active in Canadian interjuridictional projects after retirement.

John chaired the working group that produced the Uniform Electronic Evidence Act and another that created the Uniform Electronic Commerce Act.

From 1997 through 2013 he was a member of the Canadian delegation to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law's working group on electronic commerce. UNCITRAL has invited him to chair panels at meetings on electronic commerce topics in New York and Vienna.

The UN connection also led to a speaking enagement in Korea in 2012. In 2015 John served as UNCITRAL's expert representative at an UNCTAD conference on e-commerce legislation in the Caribbean region. He also spoke at Arbitration Week in Hong Kong in 2017.

He has advised the Ministry of Justice of Vietnam on the development of policy and legislation, as part of a long-term Canadian aid project.

In 2017 John was elected a Fellow of the American College of Commercial and Finance Lawyers.

In 2018-19, John served as a legal consultant to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN/ESCAP) in evaluating the legal readiness for cross-border paperless trade of four Asian countries (Armenia, Mongolia, Myanmar and Uzbekistan.) In the Covid years, he was online legal consultant to a dozen national self-assessments on that topic for ESCAP. More recently he updated such an assessment of the law of Bangladesh originally done by others in 2019.

In 2019-20, he reviewed the law and regulation of e-commerce for the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) Institute and the Asian Development Bank. His Policy Brief for that project is online, as is the full report (with additional material from the ADB). 

In 2021-22, he analysed the law of Mongolia and of the Kyrgyz Republic with a view to creating a legal environment conducive to electronic commerce.

For a decade, John wrote a bimonthly technology law column for the collection law blog Slaw.ca. in 2020 he won a Clawbie, a Canadian law blog award, for a decade of such columns.

For thirty years he also managed a well-regarded mailing list on the law and policy of electronic communications, a list with over 500 members in 20 countries.

John has been a director and is a life member of the CanTechLaw Canada Association and is currently a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Canadian Journal of Law and Technology.

He was also, from 2003 to 2018, co-chair of the Subcommittee on Cross-border e-Commerce of the Cyberspace Committee of the Business Law Section of the American Bar Association.

John has been a frequent speaker in English or French on electronic commerce and electronic government, domestic and international.

He has been Editor and member of the Editorial Board of The Philanthropist, an online journal about legal, accounting and management issues affecting Canadian charities. He stepped down in 2021 after a dozen years as president of the Agora Foundation, publisher of The Philanthropist.