Sarit Batner

2I'm very well, how are you?

4I was born in North York at Branson Hospital. I think it's still there at Finch and Bathurst. I'm first generation Canadian, as is my brother, but we were born here.

6I did not know that.

8Sure. My mom is or was born in Romania, in Transylvania. In Sibiu in the mountains. She was an only child— she is an only child— and she was raised there to parents. My grandfather was very industrious and successful. He had sort of the Midas touch in business, not formally educated but a very successful man in that way. But they lived in Romania at a time under Ceaușescu. It was a challenging time to be in Romania, challenging time to be successful in Romania, and certainly a challenging time to be Jewish and successful in Romania. They fled Romania in 19— in the early 1960s, I believe, when my mom was 15. So maybe even before that.

9And they went to Israel. And although they had means when they were in Romania, when they went to Israel, they couldn't take anything. They didn't have anything. It was a very equalizing place. My dad, if you're gonna go just the flip side of that, my dad is also from Romania, although my parents didn't meet there. My dad is from a tiny little town in the northeast of Romania called Tecuci, where he always jokes that there are more cows than people. Unlike my mom, he did not grow up with means. They grew up very poor. He used to say he doesn't have a middle name because they couldn't afford one. They also left Romania and went to Israel.

10He was a little bit older, as a place where there might be opportunity. So my parents met in Israel. In the '60s, in the early '60s, when my mom was 18 and my dad was 23. And they probably never would have crossed paths in Romania, but in Israel, where it was— everything was all changed and they were equalized socioeconomically, that they met there, and that's how they knew each other. They married in Israel 2 years later in 1966, and within, I think, 9 months came to Canada for opportunity. They came on a boat to Canada with literally nothing. So to go back to my mom, my mom was educated as a chemist in Israel.

11She had a good— so my mom spoke Hungarian, German, Romanian when she was in Israel. When she was in Romania, when she went to Israel, she learned Hebrew, she learned French, she learned English. So when she came to Canada at 20, she had a degree in chemistry, and very quickly they came to Toronto. Very quickly she was able to get a job in chemistry. She worked as a chemist till she was in her mid-30s, at which time she had already had 2 kids. And then she didn't like it, and she was really a trailblazer. She quit. She taught— she had got a second degree here in English and French, and she taught French to adults for a couple years.

12And then she opened a bookstore, the Batner Bookstore, which is still open now 40 years later, and my brother runs. So that is my mom's story. She is a truly fascinating, smart, trailblazing lady.

14You should interview my mom. You would love to interview my mom.

16I believe 1981.

18It was a brand— it was a new bookstore. She had— she did literature. She did— she had a Judaica section, which was a bit novel at the time. And very quickly she learned that she didn't know much about business and she didn't know much about bookstores. She just had a dream that she wanted to do it. She was pretty young. She was still in her late 30s. And so she eventually shifted and added to the business textbooks. So at the time there was Grade 13 in Ontario and you had to buy your Grade 13 textbooks and the private schools, the Jewish schools, the Catholic schools, you had to buy your textbooks. So she moved into the textbook industry where there was a greater opportunity to make money, and she supplemented her true joy of literature and owning a bookstore and having a community bookstore with a textbook business.

19And so it grew. It survived Chapters and all the big box bookstores, one of which opened around the corner and really changed the bookstore industry. And she, scrappy as she is, managed to survive. My brother went into business with her after he went to university, and he's been in the business now for 20+ years. She is now no longer in the business, although I think she still has a hand in and does some stuff for him. But they— but he runs the business now, 42 years later.

21Karina. Karina Batner.

23So an interesting question. Batner is my dad's last name, but they're not sure if it was actually Batner because there wasn't paperwork and there wasn't documents and he lived in this tiny little town. And there's a funny story I'm told that my dad's grandfather or something collected the money that they had and gave all the papers to a man who was going to come overseas to North America and was going to find out if there was a place for them to come here. And of course, that man disappeared with all their money and all their ID. And so they don't actually know exactly if it's Batner, but that's the closest that they've ever been able to figure out it could be.

25My dad is also a fascinating person. Extremely smart man. He had a degree in electromechanical engineering from Bucharest University, which he got before he left Romania. But when he came to Canada back then— not now, but back then— they didn't recognize Bucharest University's degree. So he had to go back to school here, and he did not speak English when he came here. So he needed to learn the language and go back to school. Fortunately for my parents, my mother already had the language. She got a job very quickly, within weeks, at the Ontario government working at a water testing plant as a chemist. So she was able to make money and support them.

26He learned the language and went back to school, and I believe worked part-time in Toronto Parks and Recs, of all things, doing gardens and doing those types of things. And he went to York University and he got a degree in computers. Computer science, which at the time was cutting edge, right? Mid-1960s, giant computers, cutting-edge ideas. And interestingly, he spent his whole career here in computers, never going back to engineering, which was his first degree.

28My dad's family spoke Romanian, although it's interesting, they spoke sort of a poor person's dialect of Romanian. My mother's family spoke High German, they spoke Hungarian, they spoke Romanian, and then when she went to Israel, they spoke all sorts of languages. And so together, my parents at home spoke Romanian. Often they spoke Romanian or a mix of Romanian and English to us, but we always answered in English. But my mother, to her parents, you sometimes would speak German. And my grandparents, my mother's parents, to each other would often speak Hungarian. And so my parents came here in '66. Her parents— she was an only child— followed her from Israel within months after they got here.

29So my nuclear family here in Canada, the whole time I was growing up, was my brother, who's only 1 year older than me, my parents, and my mom's parents. And we were very, very close, the 6 of us. But no cousins, no uncles, no aunts, no other family, just the 6 of us. But because of that, we were very close with my, with my mom's parents. And until they, they died— my grandmother when she was 81 and my grandfather when he was 92— we saw them weekly for our whole lives. We spent weekends at their house. When we were little kids and we were very close to them. But like my grandfather spoke Esperanto.

30I don't know if you know what that is, but it was a—

32So it was this made-up language of a combined bunch of languages that Europe thought originally was going to fly to allow people to communicate. My grand— so language was a funny thing around our table. You could hear a lot of different languages flying around and, you know, good luck to you, keep up, or

34No, I got my Bachelor of Science from Western University. Oh,

36So none of it was their influence. My, my parents are actually highly left-leaning, highly liberal, highly non-pressured parents. So all my pressure was always internally driven. So my parents would have said to me back then, do whatever you want to do, the world is your oyster, but never a path, never an expectation. For me, a mathematics degree always made sense, but it was always a means to an end. Math was something that came easy to me. It was something I knew I could be successful in, and I always wanted to do law from, from an early age. So for me, it was always going to be math and then law. So it was a means to an end, a place I knew I could succeed and, and get on with doing law.

38So I think when I was really little, I wanted to be a junior kindergarten teacher, but Beyond about grade 2, I think I came to understand that some people got paid to argue, and I thought that is the job for me. And I had a real idea of what a lawyer was until, frankly, probably even law school. I think I had an image of what a lawyer was or a rough notion of what a lawyer was. But this idea that somebody got paid to argue, somebody got paid to be the spokesperson, that really was a notion and a concept that from a pretty young age was appealing to me. To this day, I have days in court, increasingly on Zoom, but not so long ago in court, where I'm walking home from court laughing to myself thinking it's kind of crazy that we get paid to do this truly amazing job.

40Math came later. I don't think I realized as a young person that you needed to do a degree before you even go do law. So I think in high school, I don't remember the moment at which it came to me that you needed to do something first, but when I understood or learned of the concept of an undergraduate degree or a need to do something before law where you would have to do really well in order to get into law, sciences and mathematics in particular would have been— that's when it would have been, well, I'll obviously do mathematics and that will be the easy way for me to go forward into law.

43funny story about Andrew Bernstein is he was a year ahead of me in law school and his, his law school summaries were infamous in my law school class a year behind him in law school.

48Yes. However, I didn't study applied mathematics. I studied pure mathematics, and there's a difference. There were no numbers in my degree. There was no plugging in. There was no computations. My degree was about delta and epsilon and concepts and proofs. And it was often— in fact, the hardest thing that I had to learn in my degree is when you were trying to prove something I would say, how do you know what to do next? I can remember in second year law doing linear algebra or some of the pure mathematical notions. Where do you even know where to start? How do you even know where to go? And the answer was you just need to be creative.

49You need to think outside the box. You need to know enough to borrow from elsewhere. And so in many ways, mathematics is a great breeding ground for exactly what you were talking about in terms of law. And pure mathematics isn't rigid and isn't computational and isn't formulaic. It's creative and it's, it's future-looking and it's exploring. And actually, the truth of the matter is, although compared to many people I have a great aptitude in mathematics, compared to the highest level of mathematicians, I have very poor aptitude in mathematics. And, you know, maybe I might have gone on to do a master's in mathematics that that was in the cards for me. But I don't think I would have been able to go on to do a PhD in that, in pure mathematics, or to be, you know, somebody who can create and move the dial on pure mathematics.

50I don't think that kind of mathematic genius lives within me. But what you are talking about actually is the creativity and forward-lookingness of pure mathematics at the undergrad level. They really just try and give you enough tools about enough theories and enough types of mathematics so that you can begin to start thinking and borrowing from other realms. And so in many ways, it's exactly overlapping to what you're describing. And unlike applied mathematics, I think it's the perfect launching pad for the notion that you need to be able to look elsewhere and borrow and grow and look forward, not only backward, in trying to find your solution.

52I don't think I could have handled it.

54So I was in law school at U of T between '95 and '98, and this was well before on-campus interviews or OCIs. This was at the very beginning of even a concept of summering being something most people did. In fact, in the year ahead of me, which was Andrew Bernstein's year, I believe only 6 or a very small number of students— I don't think it was a quarter, like, I think it was a small number— even did summer jobs. So it was the beginning of this summer student recruit. It was still back in the time where the real law school recruit came from articling, not summering. So I had never heard of a law firm when I went to law school.

55I didn't come from a lawyer's family. I didn't, you know, I came from Eastern European immigrants. We didn't, they didn't know lawyers. I didn't know lawyers. And so when I went to law school, I couldn't name a law firm. Certainly I couldn't name the one I'm at, but I mooted when I was in law school. And when I did second year law school, I mooted the Gale Moot. And when I did the run-throughs of the Gale moot, one of my run-throughs had lawyers from McCarthy's, and my mooting partner said to me that she was far more organized and on the ball and plugged in. You know, her history was sort of Old Toronto, and she was far more oriented to law firms and lawyers.

56And, you know, and she said to me, these people are from McCarthy Tétrault. They have an excellent litigation department, and anyone who wants to do litigation wants to litigate there. And that was the seed in my mind of McCarthy Tétrault. There were then some paper brochures that were handed out for the law schools. I collected the ones that looked interesting to me. I gave them to my mother, asked her, what do you think of these? She picked a few and I applied to 4. That was kind of like, it wasn't like it is now where people apply. I don't know what they do, but I'm sure it's more than 4. And I got interviews at that 4, one of which was McCarthy's.

57And literally the day of my interview, I knew that it was going to be the place for me. Like, you know, we've moved away from fit and the subconscious bias that makes hiring by the concept of fit problematic. But from the perspective of a 22-year-old me who walked into McCarthy's offices in February of 1997, Every single person I met made sense to me. The decoration made sense to me. The colors made sense to me. And that was it. I, I— the callback calls that year were on February 14th. I got a callback at 8 in the morning and I accepted. And that's it. I've been at McCarthy's. I started on May the 6th or May the 4th, 1997, 20— almost 26 years ago.

58And I've never looked back and I've loved it since the beginning.

60It's interesting. I appreciate intellectually the clash, but the people that I interacted were outspoken and opinionated, and they were quick to smile, and they were funny, and they talked over each other. And so even though they weren't— they were white shoe, blue chip, whatever you want to call it— they had a feeling and a feel that was familiar to me. And, you know, it never felt foreign, and it never felt like you might expect given, given given the institution and the, and the history, which by the way I did not know at the time. I now love the history of the firm. I can't get enough of it. But at the time I had no clue.

61As a 22-year-old, I had no clue.

63He was not. I did not know of Tom Curry until I came into summer, and even then in my summer he was very tangential. I did not really get to know him until I came back as a lawyer, and I didn't really, really get to know him until I was doing my first trial in second year, and he was the one who happened to be around, and I bounced off him every day. But that was a few years later already. The people who interviewed me at the firm were Sheena McCaskill, who, who, who now has a successful, I believe, coaching business. John Keefe, who was at the firm for 6 seconds because he was actually not a McCarthy's lawyer, but he came for 2 years and then he went back to his firm, and he happened to be there.

64Will McDowell, Mark Freiman. So those were the people who, who it— and actually Kirby Chown, many others, but not not at the time Tom Curry.

66In my very early time at McCarthy's, some of my biggest mentors were Bill Black, now Justice Justice Black, Paul Steep, who is still at the firm. And in my early days they had a tremendous influence on me from a litigation perspective. In my first year, in my— when I was summering, I, I didn't do a trial. But when I was articling, I participated in, I think, two— one trial with Gerry Sedvari, one trial with Bill Black. Maybe there was a third one. In my first year, I did a trial with Darryl Cruz, and then in my second year I had 6 trials, 3 of them as lead. This one, the one that was a significant material 2-week trial, was in a franchise case.

67I acted for the franchisor and for the lawyer because there was a solicitor's negligence aspect to the case. It was a case that I had with Darryl Cruz, but we thought actually it was going to resolve, and he ended up having to go to the States to deal with another client and another issue and left it in my hands. And it didn't resolve. And so there I was attending, going to attend the case, and actually Daryl, who had been the senior on the file, was not in the country. Enter Tom Curry. But what's very interesting about that case is it was my first material trial that I did on my own. And back in those days, just to hearken back to my dad for a second, my dad retired just before the year 2000, but you may recall Y2K was a big scare about what was going to happen.

68So my dad was a COBOL specialist, and that was the language that was super needed around the Y2K issue. So he was highly headhunted and ended up going back to work for a computer consulting company just before Y2K and for Y2K. And then when I got hired at McCarthy's, they wanted him to stay on. He had already retired, and he said, I will stay on if you put me at your offices, which were at Jarvis and King. So they did. And so throughout my first year of practice, I had coffee with my dad most days. I had lunch with my dad probably once a week. And whenever I went to court, he would come with me and carry my bag.

69This was before wheelie bags were a thing. And when I went to this trial, he came with me. He literally came to court with me. He sat in the courtroom. He learned the— knew the court stuff. And just a funny little anecdote of my dad. When I took my first mat leave in 2002, he retired again because he was like, well, if you're not there, I'm not there. That's how it was. But for my first few years of practice, this. He was around and he participated in this case. In terms of how I felt, I'm not a person who— I'm a person who loves to speak. I'm a person who loves the microphone, and I'm not a person who has a lot of nerves around court.

70But I think as a practical matter, there's an energy and a nervousness to court that nobody escapes. To some people, it's paralyzing. To some people, it's energizing. I think there's a physicality to it that you feel in your body. Some people feel unwell, some people feel that excess of adrenaline, some people feel almost nauseous. I think that there is an energy to the nerves around representing somebody's interest and getting up and tackling them in that very unpredictable way that a courtroom provides. So yeah, I'm sure I was highly nervous in that sense, energized but nervous. This. The lawyer on the other side was 25 years my senior. My experience was very small and my knowledge even of how to prep properly and how to know what I was doing really grew as the case went on.

71I don't even recall that I had a junior— maybe I had a student sitting with me. I don't even recall that being the case. And then every day when I came back to the office, of course, when you come back to the office from court, you have a million things you want to talk about— the good, the bad, the ugly, the questions, what does this mean and what did this wrinkled brow mean and what do you think this question meant and how am I going to deal with that? And Tom Curry was in the corner office of the row that I was in at the time, and I would wander down to his office and, you know, often spend an hour bouncing issues, bouncing ideas, talking about what to do next and where to go next.

72So it was an exciting time. Even at the time, I think I knew that it was a great opportunity that I was getting. And and yeah, there would have been a lot of energy and nerves around it.

74So a combination of things. First of all, 3 of them were as junior. So I wasn't leading those cases. One of them was a small claims trial, but still a trial nonetheless.

76So I would say a combination of the things you said. I was always hungry to be in court, any court. You have a consent matter, I'll march up to court. You have an unopposed matter, I'll march up to court. And so I put myself out there as a yes person. If you want someone to go to court, if it's tomorrow, if it's last minute, whatever it is, if it requires work, I'll do it. And so part of it was just being willing in the context of a very busy practice to always say yes and take on more. If somebody would say, can you go to court to do I would always say yes. And they would say, well, you haven't heard what I said.

77And I would say, whatever you said, yes. So part of it was just people knew that if they needed someone to do something, I was going to take it on. So if people were leaving the firm, right, firms have a degree of attrition, which you would expect and which is appropriate. People leave and then somebody needs to step in. When you don't plan for a trial and you have to adjust your practice to drop it in for an associate, it can be often hard and stressful. And I was always willing to take on that stress. Yes, give it to me, I will figure it out. So a lot of my junior trial opportunities came from transfer files that I was just willing to work the extra hours, do the extra work, make the time, and figure it out.

78Part of it is that we have the high, high privilege at McCarthy's of doing work for the Canadian Medical Protective Association. We've been doing work for the CMPA for 130, 140 years. Like, it's a long-standing relationship. And what makes that work unique is that unlike commercial work, there— it's professional negligence work. And professional negligence work has a higher likelihood of going to trials because it doesn't work on an economic analysis in the same way. So commercial cases, there's always a number that people are willing to settle at, and people usually don't stand on their principles. Sometimes if there's a knock-on effect or if there's a company reputation issue, but overwhelmingly there's a number and there's a settlement.

79But in professional negligence cases—lawyers, accountants, doctors, engineers—there's often an unwillingness or a lack of a desire to settle because your reputation and your future is at stake. And so the CMPA work afforded a great opportunity to do trials much more than the commercial work. And our associates all do a lot of CMPA work. Not all of our partners. Like everything else, some people move on to other things. But we our associates all do. And so as an associate at McCarthy's, I think you get a disproportionate— or at any firm that has the benefit of doing professional negligence work where you have a defense organization instead of an insurance company behind you, there's this great, great opportunity.

80And so I was able to capitalize on that. But even today, our associates, we have many associates who have done many trials as an associate, as a junior, but often with significant roles, cross-examining experts, doing legal arguments, doing parts of the opening and closing. And so I think it's a combination. I was hungry for it. I was willing to take it on. And we had this great client that afforded, I think, more opportunities than other clients or other types of work afforded.

82There's so much in that question but let me say this. I would say the, the— often you can end a medical negligence trial early by a highly successful cross-examination of their expert, and that has happened to me many, many times. However, my own personal view of litigation is you win a case in your case, not in their case. And so it's a bit two-pronged. If you do well enough on your cross-examination of their experts, you might be able to end the trial with a dismissal or something else in advance of— usually it's a settlement, right? You cross-examine their case so well that they settle the case. That happens a lot. But if you don't do that, then you— I think it is a much more challenging skill to do a compelling examination in chief than it is a cross-examination.

83And I think it is there where you actually win your case. When you actually run a trial to the end, it's in your case when you win your case. We talk as people much more akin to cross-examination in a lot of ways than examination in chief. And so it's hard to tell a story and keep the ball in the air with the witness being the star of the show. And I I think when you teach trial advocacy, you see that people struggle much more mightily with doing a finessed and effective storytelling chief than cross-examination. You know, this— One more point, sorry to interrupt. You actually asked me about a commercial trial. The only other difference I would say, there's lots of differences between a medical negligence case and a commercial case.

84The two overwhelming differences I would say is number one, this is how I describe my practice. Commercial cases are often very legally interesting, but sometimes not that factually interesting. Medical negligence cases are always very factually interesting, but often not that legally interesting. There's sometimes you have a new legal concept, but rarely. The law in medical negligence is much more established and changes much more rarely, whereas there's much more opportunity to move and grow and stretch the law in commercial cases as a rule, not in every case, obviously. But the other aspect I would say is there's such a real human element in medical negligence cases, and we always come in with the black hat.

85Where we act, because there's always a plaintiff who has almost always been genuinely harmed and affected. And we do not have a no-fault system in Ontario. So the question just becomes not were they harmed, not did something bad happen to them, not is it sympathetic. Those things are almost always true. But just did the doctor do something that fell below the standard of care that caused the problem? And so So the backdrop of a medical negligence case is almost always a very sympathetic— that you even as the lawyer for the physicians could see and acknowledge a very sympathetic background where you stand up and say, yes, this awful thing did happen to you. But in our system of fault, our system that is not no-fault, we need to assess whether it was the physician's fault or whether it was just one of those things that happened that unfortunately you won't be compensated for.

86Which makes it hard.

90So a number of things. Every time you say something, it raises a whole bunch of things in my mind the same way it's raising for your mind. I don't agree that lawyers lack empathy or sympathy, or at least that is not my experience of them. You know, the people I work with both at my firm and the people I've worked with across the table, I find them generally to be very sympathetic, very caring of the rights of people, whether they're in commercial cases or in medical negligence cases. So that's— I didn't read that Twitter feed, but that is not my experience of lawyers. I also don't think you need to attack, or I wouldn't use the word attack in all but the rarest of cases.

91I don't think there is a need to attack the plaintiffs in a plaintiff's case. I you know, especially when you have cases, the kinds of cases I often do that involve children or that involve real serious injuries, it is almost invariable that there is a real injury, a real problem, real harm, real trauma. That is almost always— it's very rare to have a malingering plaintiff. People don't like to be in the— like, it happens, but it's, it's the exception, not the norm. They genuinely they usually are very genuine and very honest and they're telling their story. There can be disagreement about what, what is the costs that arise, how much money do they need, right?

92You can't fix most things with money, but money is the only thing the system has to offer. So we do this weird mismatch where we try and fix real problems with money and then we can have a disagreement about what is the appropriate amount of money in the context of our system. So you can attack their argument that they need $10 million to fix this problem instead of $5 million to fix this problem, that they require a renovated house or they require a new house that doesn't need renovations. You can attack those things, but you're genuine. Generally, it's almost— it's extremely rare to be attacking them in any way, that they're not saying something right or not saying something wrong.

93If I were going to use the word attack, I would reserve it for the experts. Medical negligence trials are usually a battle of the experts. There are two experts. One of them says the doctor fell below the standard of care. And caused the injury. One of the doctors says they didn't fall below the standard of care and cause the injury. Or sometimes they're just talking about causation. Whatever happened, whether it was a breach of a standard or not, it had nothing to do with this, or it had something to do with this, this being the outcome. That's where you go after a really independent, educated person who's capable of withstanding that and has no horse in the race.

94You take literature, you have literal ammunition that you can, from the records, from the literature, from textbooks, that you can put to those witnesses to undermine their position. And in most cases, to pull them over to your place, if you can do that, or in some cases to push them off onto an island where they live on their own, which undermines their opinion. But whether you're in a push or a pull, you're doing it with ammunition and you're undermining them. But it's an expert battle almost invariably. And it's not about the plaintiffs who've generally had something terrible happen to them.

98So we are a big institution, and with big institution comes policies and procedures. So we have a, we have a partnership application process. We have a policy around becoming when first income partner and then equity partner. But the fundamental idea is after a certain period of time you are eligible to be considered for the income partnership. There are criteria you have to meet, but largely you have to demonstrate legal excellence, a possibility at the income partnership level for a sustainable practice, something that you are doing that is additive to the program. That's at the income partner level. And then you have a few years as an income partner, and it's a similar standard into the equity partnership, just with a little added.

99Is your practice now actually sustainable? Can you, at least to some component, you know, bring in work or do some, some work that is a part of our program, that is anticipated to be a part of our program into the future? Like, what will you be doing when you're at the firm? This is kind of another way to look at it. Now we are a big firm and we have big and small files, and so depending on your specialty and what you focus on, that will be different. But that's the general idea we have, and I think this is true probably at all big firms now and many small firms. It's a number of years to income partnership and then a few more years when you're eligible for equity partnership.

101So we have a bunch of formal processes where when you come to the firm, you get formal mentors, you get a senior mentor, you get a junior mentor when you're a student, when you're an articling student, when you're an associate. And so I always have in my collection a bunch of people who have been assigned to me to be their formal mentor. So that is one way. And then when you're a senior associate, you get what's called a career mentor. And so I always have formal people who have been assigned to me in that way. However, that is not generally where, necessarily where, or in connection to that in any way that these mentoring relationships form.

102So lots of people seek me out and ask me to be their formal mentor, and I almost always say yes if they do. But any person that I work with on a file, I consider to be a mentee of mine. They work with me, they learn from me, they talk to me, I learn from them. It's a two-way street. But you get a lot of mentoring just working on a file, seeing how you marshal a case, understanding how you build affidavits, understanding how you prepare for court. There are no associates that I work with on any material file that I would say is not a mentoring exchange. How do you find me at McCarthy's?

103You listen in the hallway. I'm so loud that usually people can just pick out where I am. And people do find me. When in the olden days, 3 years ago, when we were in the office every single day without any question, my office was a revolving door of people wandering in and out. Now I spend the majority of my time at the office, but some of my time at home where I am now. People Teams me. They Zoom me, they call me on my cell. So it's— we're highly connected even though wherever we are.

106Tom, the Lenczner Slaght, Griffin, Roy Smith.

108McCarthy's— Marguerite Etier went there. That firm has unbelievable ties to McCarthy's.

110Sarah Corman, both from McCarthy's. Corman.

112Like, there are lots and lots of— we— if you wanted to do a list of law firms of people who have ties to McCarthy's, our alumni network is unbelievably chock-full of outstanding lawyers. It's truly impressive. The alumni are amazing. They've gone on to do amazing things, not just in their firms in-house all over the place.

114Another example.

116Oh,

118So those are very different. So two different questions. Why do people leave McCarthy's is for a million reasons. And also big firm life is not for everyone. You might be an amazing lawyer, but you might not be a lawyer who wants to have a high-volume practice. You might want to be a lawyer who works on a few things extremely well but doesn't touch 10 files a day every day, you know. So that might be one thing that you do. You could be it could be a wrong fit. You might not want to be in a big firm. You might not want to be in an all-service firm. You might not want to have so many people that you're working for.

119You might not want to have conflicts that we always deal with at big firms. You might want to not want to have so much— I don't want to call it red tape, but infrastructure around what you're doing. There are a million reasons. You might not want to do so much BD. You might not want to, you know, have to answer for yourself every year with an application for this, that, or the other. There are a million reasons why the structure doesn't work for people, or the program doesn't work for people. Why did I stay? The same reason I came. When I came to McCarthy's, actually, Sheila Block was interviewing me together with Trish Jackson to go to Torys.

120And on my third iteration, I think we did a dinner, a lunch, and a breakfast across the street. And what Sheila said to me then is, listen, if you want to be the best you can be when you get on your feet, then you want to come here. We will train you. You will work with the best. You will. And if you want to just get up and get pie in your face and not her words, my words, but like if you, if you want to just get out there and get on your feet and be in that environment where you're underwater, then that's the reputation, at least back in '97, I would say still now to some, that McCarthy's.

121So I don't want to cast aspersions, and maybe I'm putting words in Sheila's mouth, but that is what I took away from the discussion. And in that moment, I realized this was an obvious choice to me. I absolutely wanted to be standing up and taking it on the chin, unprepared. And I wanted to be lead counsel when I was a summer student. I wanted to always be the person at the podium. To this day, as a mentor, you always need to let your people stand up. And I am always thinking to myself as I sit there, I would like to be at the podium. And so for me, it was always going to be the right place.

122But that feeling of stretch, that stretch that is the McCarthy's trait, is not for everyone. Not everyone wants to feel stretched all the time. Not everyone. Some people would prefer to have excellent training and watch and eventually be ready or not ready. And that is completely valid too. It is not a less valid way to learn or succeed, and stupendous lawyers have come up both channels. You just kind of need to know yourself and need to— you need to know where do you fit along that spectrum. So number one, the ability to always be, you know, punching above my weight class was something that really kept me going, number one. Number two, even though it's a big institution with a lot of policies and whatnot, I think there's a lot of elbow room at McCarthy's, and certainly I have felt that I had a lot of elbow room.

123I never felt interfered with in the way that I wanted to run my practice or run my life. You know, of all the things we talked about, we haven't talked about my kids. I am, I'm, I have 2 kids. I had them as associates even before I had kids, but certainly once I had kids, like, I left the office at 5:30 every day religiously. I'm not an evening worker. I'm a morning thinker. And people would say to me, how do you do that? And I would say, I leave. Like, I close my computer and I leave. Back in those days, no, no cell phones, no laptops, no nothing. And I always just did that, and it was always just okay.

124And so for me, that was another big important thing about working at McCarthy's is I wanted to work at McCarthy's. I wanted to stay at McCarthy's, but I was able to draw the lines and hold the lines. And I suppose if it hadn't worked out, then I wouldn't be working at McCarthy's, but it always did work out. And so that's another reason I have stayed, because it works for me and because I have loyalty to the institution where I was able to grow and learn on my own terms. And I have loyalty both to the institution for allowing me that and to the people coming up behind me to do whatever I can to ensure that they have that type of an experience.

126I, now I leave and come and go when I want, but it's very interesting. Now I'm an empty nester. So now actually my pressure's—

128My kids are in university, all of them. Oh, wow.

130Again, I think it was a combination, right? I also did that through— no, the first time I had a BlackBerry is actually what it was, was 2005. And by then I already had had both my kids and was, was, was, were, had been back for a year. So the whole time I was having kids and doing all that, I didn't have a BlackBerry. In 2005, I got a BlackBerry. By 2006, 2006, I was a partner. And so it was tough. There, it was tough to juggle and to do it all, but and unusual. Like, I, I think it's— I had— I didn't know anyone else really who had kids for— even though I was hardly super young when I had kids, I was in my late 20s, which for our profession is very young.

131And so there weren't a lot of other mothers, there weren't a lot of supports. It was back in a time where nobody talked about family. Now it's very we talked about, but then it wasn't. So it was tricky. And so for me, there was a willingness to be flexible and an ability to hold the things that matter to me firm. And on the firm side, there was a willingness to be flexible and a willingness to be— to allow. And so, right, there's no sort of formal sit-down discussion about any of these things. I did it. It was okay.

133My ex-husband was a teacher at the time, and— or he still is a teacher. And you know, he worked full-time. So when I— when we— when I took my mat leaves, I took 6 months with my daughter, and then he took off a semester. So she had a year with a parent at home. When I had my son, similar thing. So he also had a year with a parent at home. Both my kids were conveniently born at the beginning of the summer, so which has worked out. And then, so he had, but he had no flexibility. So the interesting thing about a teacher is better hours but zero flexibility. So the flexibility always needed to come from me.

134And for reasons that I cannot now remember, I was anti a nanny of any sort. So my kids went to daycare, and they went to daycare until they were 5 and 3, at which time I couldn't get a daycare spot for my son, and I reluctantly got a nanny, at which point I realized I had made a fundamental mistake and I should have had a nanny for 5 years because my preconceptions about nannies had been wrong. And having a nanny, which by the way, that nanny then stayed with me for 15 years, was really, was life-altering in terms of having that support. But, but for my first, you know, my daughter is born in 2002, so until she was 5, until 2007, we had to deal with daycare.

135So, you know, anyone who has little kids knows they're literally sick for the first 3 years of their lives. So if you have 2 kids, you have sickness for 5 years if they go to daycare. And so that meant, again, a lot of flexibility. Got to take them to the doctors. You can't take them to the daycare if they have a fever. Like, so it was, it was tough sledding.

137Thank you for saying so. Those were very kind words, especially given the caliber of people that you've interviewed. It's been a pleasure.