Most lawyers will tell you what the law says. Robert Onley tells you what it means for your business, because he’s been in your chair. Robert is the founder of Onley Law Professional Corporation and the Founder, CEO, and General Counsel of NotaryPro Technologies Inc., Canada’s leading online notary and legal services platform. He is, in the truest sense, a lawyer who builds companies for a living, and that changes the kind of legal advice he gives.
FROM GOVERNMENT TO THE BOARDROOM TO THE FOUNDER’S DESK
Robert’s path to entrepreneurship is not a straight line, and that’s the point. After earning his J.D. from the University of Windsor Faculty of Law, where he served as President of the Student Law Society, Robert was called to the Ontario Bar in 2013. His early career took him to Global Affairs Canada, where he worked in international security. That experience sharpened an instinct for risk assessment and high-stakes judgment that still runs through everything he does.
He moved into private practice as a corporate litigator, taking on bankruptcy, insolvency, and corporate fraud files: the cases that happen when deals go wrong and governance breaks down. That taught him something invaluable. What good legal infrastructure looks like before it gets stress-tested, and what it looks like when it doesn’t.
From litigation, he went in-house at Payments Canada, one of Canada’s most complex and heavily regulated financial infrastructure organizations, where he built experience across payments law, SaaS and technology contracts, privacy compliance (PIPEDA), employment, and commercial agreements. Working inside an organization rather than billing from outside it changed how he thinks about legal advice: not as a risk memo, but as a decision-making tool.
THEN HE BUILT SOMETHING OF HIS OWN
In 2018, Robert founded NotaryPro Technologies Inc. with a simple premise: the notarization process in Canada was broken, and technology could fix it. What followed was a decade of building.
Raising capital, managing a team, navigating regulators, handling customer contracts, managing IP, and making every founder decision that his clients now face. NotaryPro grew into Canada’s premier online notary service, serving tens of thousands of Canadians. He didn’t step back from the law to do it. He ran both, simultaneously.
That experience, building a tech company while staying sharp as a corporate lawyer, is the foundation of everything Onley Law offers. When a SaaS founder comes to Robert about their customer agreement, he isn’t just reviewing contract language. He’s thinking about the business implications, because he’s lived them.
A VOICE BEYOND THE PRACTICE
Robert is a co-founder of the Young Diplomats of Canada and a former member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community, where he served as Curator of the Ottawa Hub. Both roles reflect a conviction that good institutions are built through careful governance, clear rules, and honest accountability. He brings that conviction to every client relationship.
WHY ONLEY LAW
Robert founded Onley Law because he saw a gap that no one was filling well. Growing Canadian businesses, past the startup stage but not yet large enough for a full-time general counsel, were either going without proper legal support or paying unpredictable hourly rates to outside firms that didn’t know their business. He built Onley Law to be something different: a corporate lawyer who thinks like an operator, operates like a partner, and prices like a modern professional services firm. Fixed monthly fees. No billable-hour surprises. Legal strategy that serves the business, not the other way around.
Onley Law is based in downtown Oshawa, at the Spark Centre, Durham Region’s leading entrepreneurial hub, and serves clients across Ontario and Canada.
Robert Onley, J.D.
Called to the Ontario Bar, 2013
University of Windsor, Faculty of Law
University of Toronto Scarborough, Honours B.A., Political Science
