My Story

I started my legal career over 20 years ago at McCarthy Tétrault, 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 gender imbalance.

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 diversity of thought, the power of the mind, 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.

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 worked in-house at that organisation – a leading UK bank – from 2018 to 2026. 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. Read my T.S. Eliot article.

Synchronicity is something that intrigues me (oh the mystery and the magic!) and it seems to happen to me a lot. To get a handle on this, I’ve attempted to read Synchronicity by Carl Jung on more than one occasion but I always seem to stop reading at around page 5. There is more work to be done to work out the concept, but for now I’ve stopped analysing and allow myself to enjoy the sense of wonder, joy and interconnectedness that each synchronicity brings.

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 be more present and embodied to flourish as a human being at work.

If we work together, I won’t tell you what to do (there are no eight easy steps to being human) – but I will offer practical ideas backed by science (and sometimes by my own experience) 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, please do get in touch.