“I’m proud of you, but I want you to know that your tuition costs more than our mortgage and I won’t be able to help you pay for it.”
The words my mother said to me the day I found out I was accepted into the University of Toronto’s four-year JD/MBA program. She has always been a strong source of support throughout my life, but the stark realization that my future success depended on my ability to pay back the massive student debt I was about to accumulate was jarring.
I had begun a path of no return.
Coming from humble beginnings, and working every job imaginable since the age of 14 to help pay for school and support my family, I was no stranger to hard work. I was going to give law school everything I had.
Despite my historically strong work ethic, I quickly discovered that law school was a different animal altogether. My success on exams was not secured simply by going to class and completing the readings. I had to be able to synthesize information quickly, spot issues, articulate two sides of an argument coherently under time pressure, and I had to do this while managing the financial stress of landing a job. I turned to upper year students for support and family friends who were practicing law – anyone who could help me navigate the journey.
I eventually managed to connect with an alumnus from the JD/MBA program who worked in a senior executive position and the Bank of Montreal. She informed me that without a competitive 1L summer role I was likely to be less successful in the 2L legal recruit. She provided me with insight into the types of roles that would be attractive to legal employers and helped me secure my first year summer role as a policy analyst at the Bank of Montreal. My performance there led me to a second-year summer role in Capital Markets at BMO working as a Project Manager. The strength of these roles is what allowed me to approach the New York recruit with confidence. Without them I would have been a far less competitive candidate, lacking industry experience and a demonstrated track record of interest in corporate transactional work. It was on the basis of that initial meeting that the rest of my legal career came together. Success for me started with landing my 1L job and getting the mentorship I needed to secure it in time.
I was exceptionally fortunate in the 2L New York recruit to have received offers of employment from Cravath, Sullivan & Cromwell, White & Case, Sidley Austin, Shearman & Sterling and Proskauer Rose. It was the single highest number of offers received by any University of Toronto JD/MBA candidate in my year. I eventually chose to accept an offer from Sullivan & Cromwell because of its strong reputation in cross-border M&A and corporate transactional work and spent my 3L summer with the firm in New York. That experience jump started my legal career not just on Wall Street, but around the world as well in London and Dubai where I also practiced corporate law.
Navigating the complexities of landing a top-tier corporate law job in my 3L summer and the meticulous planning and strategy involved in landing prestigious corporate banking roles in 1L and 2L was not easy. I had very little guidance and information about the process and realized that many other students were likely experiencing the same struggle. This is one of the reasons I came back to the University of Toronto in 2021 with an offer to assist its students through the legal recruitment process in Canada and New York.
After a year of working closely with University of Toronto candidates to establish a clear and proven pathway to successfully land top-tier corporate law jobs, I realized that it’s a system that should be equally available to ALL Canadian law school students.
