My Story

I started my legal career over 20 years ago at McCarthy Tetrault, Canada’s national law firm, and went on to be a finance lawyer at Clifford Chance (Amsterdam and London) and Latham & Watkins (London). 

When in private practice,  I noticed that many women, including me, were facing particular challenges with traditional law firm culture – and many were leaving.  At the same time, most women I knew (including me) wanted a meaningful career.  This predated “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg, but law firms were beginning to take “gender diversity” seriously as a business issue.  Around that time, people I knew well (and didn’t know so well) kept volunteering that I seemed more like a psychologist than a finance lawyer.  So I made a career change: after 7 years, I left private practice and started running events and individual sessions to empower women in law and, at the same time, began to deliver workshops at law firms to address the gender imbalance at those firms.

Over the years, this work has expanded beyond law firms to the wider corporate world (and has included the occasional speaking engagement in architecture and medicine).   The content has also evolved beyond gender to include the broader demographic diversity categories, diversity of thought, leadership and well-being. My overarching interest is in how we can make the workplace more human.

In 2012, while developing this work, I returned to practising law through Axiom, a firm that places lawyers on in-house engagements and encourages the integration of outside interests. While there, I worked as an in-house lawyer for six financial institutions.  These experiences gave me a broad overview of corporate culture and how humans behave within those cultures. Having two careers, where each one informs the other, has been a powerful combination. 

My sixth engagement as an Axiom lawyer turned into a permanent position. I didn’t plan this, but as John Lennon once sang, “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”  I have been working in-house at that organisation - a leading UK bank - since 2017. What may be noteworthy is that I happened to start writing an article about T.S. Eliot being a banker at this very bank, rather synchronistically, just one week before I received the call to work there.  You can read that article here.

Synchronicity is one of my favourite things in life (oh the mystery and the magic!) and it seems to happen to me a lot - one of my most striking synchronicities involved Bob Geldof. To get a handle on all of this, I’ve attempted to read Synchronicity by Carl Jung on more than one occasion but I always seem to stop reading at page 5.  So I’ve decided to stop analysing and enjoy the sense of wonder, joy and interconnectedness that synchronicities bring.

Speaking of interconnectedness, I hope that this work will inspire you, lift your spirits, make you think differently, enable you to understand yourself and others a little better, and help you to thrive at work. 

If we work together, I won’t tell you what to do, but I will offer practical ideas to help you to tap into your own wisdom so you can see yourself, others and your path ahead more clearly.

If you would like to work with me, you can get in touch here.