Chantelle Cseh

2Hi, Pulat. How are you this morning?

4Yes, that's right. Well, I guess from Laurentian University, but I'm from Barrie originally, and at Georgian College up here in Barrie, they have university partnerships. So my degree is from Laurentian, but I had the pleasure of doing it actually at Georgian College, which was close to home.

6I'm actually from Innisfil, which is just south of Barrie, but Barrie is, is where I hail from generally and where all of my colleagues chirp at me about being from. So I go with Barrie.

8Yes, that's right.

10If I'm being honest, I would describe it as the path of least resistance. I knew that I wanted to go to law school and I wanted to do something that interested me and where I was relatively confident that I could get good grades, and psychology seemed to fit the bill. And ultimately, when I followed through, it was both of those things. It was very interesting and something that seemed to come naturally to me, although the, the multiple choice exams were not very good preparation for law school exams.

12Yes, I took, I think, about a year in between because I did my undergrad part-time for the last semester or two. So I think there was about a year and a bit in between the end of my degree and the beginning of law school.

14For work purposes, actually. So I worked full-time throughout the entirety of my undergrad, 40+ hours a week, which is actually why I made the decision to stay close to home. I started at York University and was doing the commute, and I was just finding it a bit challenging trying to get into university studies and make that commute and work full-time. So that was the reason why I did the part-time for the last bit.

16Yeah, although I, you know, I wouldn't have been able to tell you what a litigator was, but I knew what a trial lawyer was. I grew up watching a whole lot of Matlock and I wanted to be just like Matlock. So not exactly like Matlock now in my current profession, but, you know, mooting was one of those things where it was really kind of practical and one of the best opportunities in law school to emulate what it was actually like to be a lawyer. With things like transactional law or tax law, it's a bit more difficult to get a feel, whereas litigation, the opportunity to moot really gives you a sense of what it's like to do the job and be on your feet.

17And I did the first-year moot, I think the Lerners Cup was the first one we did when we were in school together, Pulat, and when I did that, I just absolutely loved it. It was like an adrenaline sport. So really did any other moot that I was able to after that.

19I didn't do international. I did the Laskin moot. So that's an administrative and constitutional moot, and it's bilingual as well. So our team generally had English mooters and then French-speaking pleaders as well. And then I did it in my second year and placed very poorly, and so as a testament to my resilience, I did the Laskin again in my third year and got first place oralist overall. So it was really, for me, a big accomplishment having done so poorly in my second year.

21I did, yes. My mentor in law school, he actually was a Mooter as well, and he was 2 years ahead of me, and he got hired at Davies and spoke very highly of it. So as one often does with their mentors, I kind of emulated and wanted to follow in his footsteps. And when I interviewed at the firm, it really just fit the bill. I loved all of the people I met and the challenges that were presented. So started at Davies in 2009, I guess, and I've been there ever since.

23It's an interesting question because now I'm very heavily involved in the student recruitment process. I generally do student interviews and I've been in the so-called war room where, you know, we evaluate potential candidates. And it's really interesting because candidates are so diverse and they come from such different backgrounds. So I'm not entirely sure what it was. I had good grades, but I didn't have the best grades in our class. I wasn't ultimately a gold medalist or anything close to that. So I like to think that it was my resilience and the, the diversity of experiences in my resume. You know, I was working full-time when I was an undergrad and continued to work when I was in law school and just had, I think, experiences in my background that were quite different from perhaps some of the other candidates who followed more traditional paths.

24And I think the fact that I'm here this many years later speaks to the fact that they have done a good job in their recruiting efforts to look at folks that maybe don't come from strict business backgrounds, haven't done internships with banks or other law firms in their early years, but still have the capacity to be highly successful.

26So the firm is actually principally a transactional firm. So we have, I might get this wrong, but I think between 120 and 130 lawyers presently. So we are among the smallest of the so-called Seven Sister firms. And most of those lawyers, probably around 80 or so, are corporate transactional lawyers. And our litigation group is a smaller subset. So there are fewer than 20 of us, but we do punch above our weight class. You know, there are firms across the in New York City with much larger litigation groups, you know, multiple the size of ours. And they do kind of, it seems, the same number of high-profile cases. So we have a disproportionate number of what we describe as kind of bet the company cases where it's really, you know, companies' biggest cases that are facing them that we often take on, some of the most challenging cases.

27And that's one of the things that the firm is best known for is dealing with clients' kind of highest profile and most challenging issues. A lot less of what I would describe as kind of day-to-day or routine litigation. We don't have kind of a lot of the same types of files that you see over and over. But that's been great for me because I have learned about so many different industries. I've been, you know, a mile underground in an active gold mine. I could probably describe to you how to build the injection unit of an injection molding machine. I know a great deal about thoroughbred horse racing, and it's because the variety of cases that I encounter is, is almost infinite.

28So that's really how I would describe our firm and our practice is just the ability to kind of take that skill set to deal with very complex matters and apply it across a variety of industries.

30I do, yes. So that's probably— I get it varies right now. Class action defense is probably about 40 to 50% of my practice. At various points in my career, it's been more than that, but usually it hovers around the 50% mark. In particular, competition class actions, I do quite a bit of.

32Yes, only defense. In my experience, I've only done class action defense. And I think for the most part, if you ask my colleagues, we have history historically only done defense work. And that's usually, I think, probably for conflict reasons, not necessarily legal conflict, but often business conflict reasons. But there are some firms, for example, you know, you were chatting about Ren, their firm, Paliare Roland, is one that will often do both plaintiff side and defense side. But Davies generally is only on the defense side.

34Uh-uh, he's forgetting about the one case we have together where he is on for a defendant. So he's actually a member of one of our— yeah, one of our defense side cases. And I was quite excited to see him because I was hoping we would get some insights on plaintiffs' thoughts on the various defenses we usually advance.

36So it's, as you, you may know, and as the, the viewers might know, the, the test in Ontario was previously much less stringent than the comparable test in the U.S. In the US, you have to establish essentially that a class action is superior. It's the superior method of proceeding and that the common issues predominate over any individual issues. And Ontario has now adopted a similar test. It is aimed at, I think if you look at the Hansard, the legislative debates and the publications that have come out, it's aimed at leveling the playing fields for defendants and for corporations and to make Ontario more friendly to companies. Because the previous test was extremely lax. There is a quote out there, I won't name the judge, but an Ontario judge has said, I believe publicly, that he would certify a ham sandwich.

37And that was really the regime that we were living with before the amendments. You were approached by a client who was named as a defendant in a class action, and even if there was nothing to the allegations, you had to tell them that unless you had some like spicy mustard or mayo on your ham sandwich, the case was probably going to be certified. So from a defence side perspective, the current articulation of the test I think will level that playing field. The one difficulty which applies to both plaintiff and defence side lawyers alike though is the diminished number of cases being commenced in the province, because the balance of Canada still has the test that used to apply in Ontario, so a much easier test for plaintiffs to meet.

38And we actually have seen in the period since the amendments came into force in Ontario that fewer actions are being commenced in Ontario, and instead they're being started in other jurisdictions, principally B.C. So from a class actions industry perspective, you know, it will be interesting to see what happens in the coming months and years and whether Ontario kind of falls off the map in terms of having an established and developed class action practice. At least until we have some jurisprudence surrounding how this new test will be interpreted. If judges essentially look at it and say that it's not much different from what was there, it's really a matter of semantics, then it might be much ado about nothing.

39But as I said, from a class actions industry perspective, on the lawyer side, we are seeing fewer cases to take on.

41Well, the one thing I'd note is that when you're dealing with bet the company litigation, you're generally dealing with well-heeled defendants who do have the resources to allow you to kind of track down every lead, review every document in a great amount of detail, you know, meet repeatedly with whether it's external experts or your colleagues internally to really work through the issues in a way that by the time you get to trial, there is no stone that's unturned. You know the matter and the brief inside and out, cases and facts alike. When you're dealing with smaller cases, the practical reality is that clients, whether you're on for plaintiffs or defendants, and outside of the class action context, we do act for both plaintiffs and defendants, but clients just simply can't afford for you to take the innumerable number of hours required to learn a complex brief in and out.

42So you really have to be more tailored, more laser-focused in terms of where you focus your efforts and in reaching consensual resolutions in a way that is in the client's best interests. One of the difficult things is sometimes you'll get cases where your client is undoubtedly in the right and you know it, but because of the nature of the matter, it might necessarily necessitate a 6-week trial, for example, to actually get a final resolution on the merits. And often a 6-week trial, regardless of what your billing rate is, a smaller matter just can't bear the burden of having a lawyer take the time required to prepare for and then litigate a matter to that depth.

43And so, you know, the approach has to be tailored to what the client's needs are, but also from a practical perspective, what the lawyer can accomplish in the budget that's allocated. And so that's the biggest distinction that I've noticed. But it's always helpful because I do a mix of kind of both types of cases. We still do have some smaller litigation matters, and I think my experience on more complex matters allows me more quickly to focus in on what the determinative issues will be and kind of, you know, putting a bit of a wedge in there to try and bring things to a consensual resolution more quickly, as opposed to being a bit more scattershot in approach.

45If I had to be honest, you know, in my practice, and I've said the word before and I'll say it again, I think the most important thing is resilience. There are, you know, I've seen some tweets lately, you know, both you and I are members of so-called Law Twitter, and I saw somebody tweet recently about the fact that, you know, the practice of law and litigation in particular is kind of a pendulum swing between ego, between feeling at the one end, your best and the highest, and at the other end, you know, feeling your lowest because of errors or mistakes that are made. And when you practice at a high level in complex matters, you know, there is, I find, much less room for error, and I'm much harder on myself about mistakes that are made because, you know, mistakes can be of significant consequence, whether financially or otherwise, reputationally for a client.

46And so it's trying to work through the fact that none of us are perfect and we might make mistakes that are of consequence, but being able to bounce back, being able to take those experiences, take constructive feedback, and continue to learn because, you know, neither of us know it all. And 20 years from now, I still won't know it all. So it's that ability to realize that you don't know everything. You're not as good as you think you are, but you should still get up and live to fight another day because you'll learn from whatever the experience experiences are. So that's really been, I think, the most important quality in getting me to where I am today, because there have been high points, but there have also been low points, as I'm sure you can empathize with.

49I don't have any personal connection, and not sure whether you remember, but I certainly do. In my first year of law school, I didn't have a computer. So I was one of the students who wrote all my notes and summaries by hand. Throughout my first year. So certainly wasn't very high up the curve on technology whenever I started out, but I had the good fortune back in, I guess it's 2015, I was on a lengthy trial on the commercial list and it was a misuse of confidential information case and our case management judge wanted us to do things in the most efficient way possible, including the use of electronic documents, which now with The age of COVID that's kind of table stakes.

50But at the time, a lot of people, at least not in Toronto, were doing things exclusively electronically. So we had to work through as a team what the best manner of presentation was going to be. And obviously there is your ordinary type of electronic trial. But what we decided to do in that case, and I'll actually bring in a prop, here's my third piece of advocacy assistance, my iPad, which I never go anywhere without. We decided to do an iPad trial, meaning that all of the counsel and the judge actually navigated the case on a tablet. So there were no hard copy briefs, and we shared everything using iPad technology in the case, including loading up the briefs for the judge, displaying evidence, all things like that using tablets.

51And after that trial finished, I wrote an article about my experience and just how much easier and more efficient it was. But also how much easier it was to get the judge and more senior counsel to actually do things electronically using a form of hardware that was easy for them to use. You know, a laptop isn't second nature for most, but a tablet is really just, you know, push the button and then the application opens. So I wrote an article that was published in the Advocates' Journal, and things really snowballed from there. After I published that article, I started to get speaking opportunities, and I started to become more invested in the area, started doing consulting internally and externally on the conduct of electronic litigation and iPad trials, and over the past 5 years or so have really just tried to refine my skills and my expertise.

52And obviously there's been a huge boon in the use of technology for litigation, so I was fortunate to get in relatively early and kind of establish myself as one of the, I guess, now kind of the pioneers of IPAD trials, at least in this province.

54The biggest piece of advice, and it probably sounds trite, but I can't emphasize it enough, is to be yourself. You know, I came from a background where I was the first person on either side of my family to go to university, let alone law school. You know, I grew up with a family where there were no professionals in my family. My father was a roofer, my mom a server, And so I didn't really have any kind of role models in the legal industry apart from Matlock to look to. So I didn't come in with many expectations. But what I wanted to do was make sure that I joined a firm where I actually felt comfortable and didn't feel like I was being put into a box because I didn't know what the box was at that point in time.

55I didn't know how a lawyer was supposed to act. I had never had an office job, let alone a job in a law firm. So I was really just focused on finding a place where I felt like I was doing top quality work, but that the people also allowed me to be myself and didn't require me to be some kind of, you know, paradigm of what a lawyer should be. And that has really held true. That was what was my intention when I joined Davies. And as I said, you know, all these years later, 11 years later, I'm still with the firm. Because I still am the person I was in law school. You know, I was mentioning to you before we got started today, Pulat, that actually with the advent of COVID I've moved back to Barrie.

56So I'm joining all of you today from Barrie, where I've been practicing for the last half of this year, and the firm has been fully supportive of that, right? And they know who I am, they know where I'm from, they know what's important to me, that my family, being close to my family is quite important. And as I said, they've been fully supportive. So for me, that was by and large the, the most important thing. And I can't emphasize it enough because, you know, you've spent a lot of time to get where you are. People come from a variety of different backgrounds, and you don't want to end up in a position where you are unhappy or you feel like you can't actually be yourself while practicing law.

57So that would be my number one suggestion.

59Well, thanks very much for having me. Happy holidays to you as well and to everybody else. Thanks.