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Women are unequal in the profession. They may be there in representation at the beginning but they are not there as time goes on. And it because the profession isn’t very kind to us when we have children. It is not kind, not accepting, and women themselves elect out, and I think that is a problem that needs to be fixed.

Welcome to speak to a lawyer. I'm your host Avi Charney. And on this episode, we take a deep dive with Natalie Vukovich. Natalie is a leader in the field of Canadian commercial leasing. She started her own firm in 1995 and has been a huge success ever since I'm on a website  dot com. She's rated best lawyers, expert architecture, stars, credentials through the roof.

In this discussion, Natalie shares with us, her approach to building a successful and happy career in law. How values are important, family people and work ethic. I start by asking Natalie, how was it in the seventies and eighties, and what prompted you to study law?

Well, those are big questions. What was it like in the seventies? Um, you know, promising times I was a Northern Ontario girl, grew up in Sioux. Saint Marie had athletes tend to good student. Um, I hung around a lot of people who played basketball. I played basketball myself. By the way, I went to Laurentian university.

I made the junior national team. I played varsity. And then no, the summer after my second year of my math degree at Laurentian university, I was hanging around at the YMCAs playing with a bunch of guys. And a couple of them were talking about what to do after the undergraduate degree. And one in particular said, You think you're so smart?

Why don't you write the alphabet? And I said, sure. I'll write the outset. What's the alphabet. I wrote the Elsa and I scored quite well on it. And I had terrible undergraduate marks, but I had a good score. So back in those days, when you wrote the L set, you also indicated which schools you wanted your scores to be sent to too.

So I'm a LARC. I chose Del housey because I knew it had a good basketball program. I chose UBC because it was the other side of the country. I chose Texas Hawaii. I was trying to do four quarters of years. And then I chose Osgoode just in case they kind of got serious and maybe I should try to stay in Ontario or something, but I knew nothing about law and I knew nothing about being a lawyer and no one in my family had been a lawyer.

Really. I was just basically responding to a challenge guys. So, uh, In the end. I received some offers of admission today. I had taken December jobs in Toronto. I was 21 years old and I was making $9,500 a year in my little accounting job. But that's, you know, the Patty down at the corner of George and King.

And so I got this offer. All I can remember is that every day I finished my job by one 30 and I would ask for more work to do, and they would tell me to go file stuff.

USO. I was somebody in the, um, apartment of the head coach of the university of Toronto women's basketball team, because she was a friend of mine and I was living at her place and working downtown. And I felt like Mary Tyler Moore, I was not making any money, but. You know, I had color-coordinated clothing.

I was very impressed with myself. And then I got this job, this offer to go Del housey. And my parents had always said that as long as I was in school, they would financially support me. But as soon as I wasn't in school, I'd be on my own. So I was on my own for all of about a month. At that point, it wasn't how hard it was to rub nickels together.

And, um, so I thought, Hmm, maybe I should do this law school thing. And, um, I told my parents and I'd been offered a spot and they were delighted, but I didn't really want to go that far away. So I walked to our, I took the subway up to the, um, Your university campus. And then I walked the 8 million miles from there, subway station into the law faculties, offices, and nothing was electronic back then.

So I asked if they could tell me the status of my application because I had an offer from now, this was July and I knew I was late, but maybe there'd be an offer coming from Oz. Good off a waitlist. I've heard there was such a thing. So the people that I was good said, who are you? And take a look. And he went over to the waitlist and they said, Oh, there you are.

You're number two on the wait list. Oh, that's wonderful. When do you think I'll hear if I've been accepted, which is what we don't know. We don't know if anyone's going to turn us down. I mean, we're a pretty good school. Why are you asking? Well, I've got this offer from Dalhousey or that's a very good school.

Why don't you go to Dalhousey? And I said, well, cause you know, it's far. And I would really like to be in Toronto and I'm from Ontario. And they said, well, I can't promise you anything. And back in those days, mail was very prompt. So I was still licking my wounds and wondering how long I would wait and what were the chances.

And I had something like 10 days to accept my offer. So it was winding down with something like four days ago. And I received a letter in the mail saying I'd been rejected by Oscar. So my decision was made for me and I went to down. 
That's that's unfortunate, but I guess it all works out right. 
Oh, it worked out great.

Then I played basketball for Dallas as well. I really enjoyed the East coast. It was a very good experience and I was lucky, really ticket accepted because my undergraduate marks were so abysmal. That was good. The degree. And of course I made my way back to Ontario, as soon as I could. Right.

I'll pause. I was doing my research a little bit already about your, um, you know, you, you noted how influential your parents were, and even now you commented about how supportive they were, I guess, both financially and otherwise of your decision to go to law school and, uh, ultimately, you know, grow as a person. Maybe you can comment a bit about the influence that the importance of, uh, you know, supportive parents. 

Well, you know, 250% for sure. Um, my parents were immigrants from Yugoslavia. They came to Canada in 1956 and seven. Um, My father came first. He got a job in the mines and now in Kirkland Lake, my eldest sister had been born back in India.

So she was two when she mother joined my father a little while later, he joined my father and right away, my second sister was born in 1958. My parents moved to Elliot Lake and I was born in 59’.

Um, we moved to Sue St. Marie to run a motel that has five mortgages on it and got it paid off all the mortgages they broke. My father didn't have any son cause he treated him and we were very encouraged to tell him everything. Well, Uber pushed and encouraged. If we didn't become prime minister, this is the children of immigrants. Everything is supposed to be an opportunity because she interpreted as pressure to succeed.

Yeah, we're entirely on the health costs on our way from buying for his car to help him with on payments. Paying for education.

Amazing. And you can't understate the importance of supportive parents. Absolutely. And it's interesting because my husband is also children of immigrants. And so the two of us say that, you know, that's just in our DNA and that's how we're raising. Our kids actually are all grown, but.

Fundamental building block truly important to you,

right? Right. Yeah. The idea that you would somehow.

No, not at all. There was no coddling. So, um, before we get into your career and how you built a attend and your first job in law, I just want to pause a second at the law school moment and, and ASCA, you know, these days. A feminism, any quantity is important back then. Was there any sort of, um, you know, standing out by being a female, I've read Ruth Bader Ginsburg's, uh, comments about how she being one of the few women at Harvard and also a mother, the burden of responsibility.

Did you feel anything or was a sense of equality back then? 

I was oblivious to it. My class had 50% females. The thought that we derived it wasn't until much later I discovered that she hadn't been so at logical. Well, there was no sense that men were superior to women of our smartest students, the valedictorian with a female or many of those shining lights in the classroom were female.

I think how female, or at least close to half female, it was just absolutely not a factor. And I was an athlete. So I was, you know, um, in the gym and being ferocious, Billy never dawned on me. There was something ahead that would amount to impediments and, um, I would also say that because I grew up in the seventies and we had a lot of women's stuff going on.

And my eldest sister was quite the, um, Staunch political person with long views hold strong views, nothing else. Get a word in edgewise. She was really sharp know brighter than all of us by far. So there was this sense that, um, we were supposed to be prime minister. We were supposed to take her, you know, my favorite one is that figure that ad come a long way.

Babies at your own cigarette now. Yeah, we own the planet. So I think that was probably why I nothing. Yeah. Feminist agenda. So to speak. I considered myself to be a feminist, as a given every woman was a feminist, how would you not be? And it wasn't until later that I thought, Oh, maybe it wasn't a good thing to be.

So I've heard about that. Amazing amazing how, you know, again, the family influence and, you know, you just have a strong belief and platform. Oblivion is a blessing in that sense, but I also want to say that my mother and father were entrepreneurs. I should have mentioned that. Not only did my father worked in the mines and then eventually at the steel plant.

My mother was also university educated. And when they came to Suzanne Murray and they bought this motel with five mortgages on it, she became front and center of that business. And then later on, when they sold the motel, she bought a ladies clothing store. She was finding fighting vendor that does this sort of very strong role model in her, around, you know, women being capable and effective and not sort of.

Pandering to a man. My mother used to always say, you have to stand on your own two feet. Never rely on a man. Never rely, man. I was just appointed. Gosh, it sounds like you have a very talented and successful family, not nice to be around. Um, let's, let's get back to you for a minute. And now that you know, you've taken us through the background and after that, what was your first job in law?

So my first job was at first choice hair cutters as an in house lawyer. Yeah, which is very interesting. It was 1985. And, um, I mentioned that I came back to Toronto after law school articles at Campbell Godfrey. Nutanix was just now asking I had the usual rotations okay. Or other civil litigation and commercial corporate.

So I did those rotations and I wasn't very good at. Anything but real estate. And then I got this, um, what's required mission course, which is a whole year at the time. And I was, um, assistant coaching at the university of Toronto women's basketball team with a friend of mine. So I was the assistant coach there from 83, 84 to 84, 85.

And then many of the women who I was. The assistant coaches who were my contemporaries, that they wanted to start a senior team. So I was basically training and playing basketball all the time, barely doing any law. And then I got this job offer from first choice, hair cutters. You were looking for somebody with zero to two years of experience, or one to two years of experience.

I had zero. So, um, I had a telephone interview with them from my apartment at Avenue Davenport, and they were located. We saga and I. Did well on the telephone interview. So they summoned me out to their offices for an in person interview. And that was very interesting. They were, um, three guys who had started a business, often, Chatham, Ontario, or one was an engineer and the other one was an accountant.

And then the third one was the hairdresser. So they decided to. Developed this chain of haircutting stores and they had at least a whole bunch of locations on the basis of offers to lease. We had not finalized the tune, any leases because back then, or couldn't take possession with those signs. And, um, they needed a bunch of leases to be finalized because they were behind on that task.

And so I didn't know anything about any of that, but in my articling days, I had enjoyed my time with the property. Slash real estate lawyers. And so I went back to them and asked if they thought it would be a good idea for me to take this job. I had a mentor who was a very nice man there. And he said, yeah, sure.

Let me hand you all of my 10 articles that I have on commercial leasing, you can read them and that'll be all. You'll need to manage the job. I took those 10 hours and I took the job. And it turned out that the engineer was extremely organized, methodical experience. He got home, he had two brokers working with him through site selection.

Deal making. And so those guys taught me everything and I was there for two years and I had to represent a tenant who was a franchise or opposite many, many landlords across the country. We had every different form of landlord. These to review, many of the offers to lease had been done on the tenants form of offer because they had created one of their own.

And so I was knocking the same clauses over into a bunch of different landlord forms of leases. They showed that they'd been picked up and respect and then negotiating all of the other terms. And I did that on a whole bunch, two different forms, opposite a whole bunch of different landlords and no lawyers.

So I really learned the field from the tenant's perspective and soon became apparent that the franchisees needed to understand how they were being supported by the franchise or, and that they could use some guidance. And so I created these manuals for the franchisees to use, to. Potentially negotiate some of their own deals and to deal with renewals so that they would understand how to exercise an option to renew and what our role would be in that regard.

But the rent split turned out to and how the many agreements would be signed. And sorry, I just got into it from the tenant perspective. And it was really, really instructed anything. I didn't know how to do, or I didn't understand, or couldn't learn from Jim, the engineer or the real estate brokers. I would read the Harvey Haber books on shopping centers.

And those are not actually written by Harvey. They're compiled by Harvey. They're all articles written by many other lawyers. You know, the last few additions I've contributed, but back then, I would just call the author of any article who was dealing with a topic that I was struggling with. Princeton's priorities or, um, nondisturbance that I would call and say you worked this article.

I don't understand it. Here's my problem. Could you help me? And they all helped to. Everybody was very willing to explain anything to me that I was asking. And then they send me on my way. Occasionally they were outside counsel who would take the opportunity to pitch me for work. And I would pull it in the sand story.

They're paying me $20,000 a year. So you don't have to spend anything on you. So I'll just learn from you. Thank you.

So that that's actually unbelievable how you just, uh, started specializing in a certain practice area, commercial leasing, and you just had to practically figure it out on your own, not to say that you didn't have guidance and resources, but you know, ultimately when you're in the thick of things and you have to make decisions in the moment, it's, it's still up to you and you can't call upon people, you know, right then and there, um, I'll start with a bit of a question or maybe spring board into, um, the advice.

Maybe you would give a fool you're a lawyer or an ambitious lawyer, fresh out of law. Um, you know, even if they want to get into, let's say commercial leasing or any other area, what kind of advice would you give him generally speaking? And then a follow up question is, do you think it's, it's good to specialize like you did, or, you know, is there, is there a value in being somewhat of a generalist.

I think it's hard to be a generalist nowadays. I would say that there are some practice areas that might be conducive to that. So for instance, a corporate commercial work, maybe civil litigation, or because you do need to stretch to be able to fill your plate, but as you can specialize in, if you like something that is fit to be, um, Competent and knowledgeable and feel that, you know, your field, your first question is as to how, what would I recommend to a young person as between specializing and not?

I would recommend specializing. I think if you've chosen the field that you can roll your States up in and make a living out of, or wouldn't choose to specialize in something or, um, Hard to get clients in. And, you know, I've also learned the hard way that it's easier to get landlord clients than it is to get tenant clients because landlords tend to have more transactions on the go.

And deeper pockets and an understanding that it's important to protect the enterprise, to ingest in the services. Whereas just as we had the brokers and the engineer doing the documents till I came along, there are many smaller players out there. And so our case tenants, many of them would rather figure it out themselves.

Get some person who's good at sentence structure and concepts and call them a paralegal and let them run the show. And that's fine. They'll probably do a decent job because you know, it's not hard to learn by the school of hard knocks. And it's just that you, um, I think if you're a lawyer and you're trying to get to be a good lawyer and not just some person who can handled transactions or tasks in an effective way way, but if you actually want to be a good lawyer where you know the law and understand it and apply it to be sophisticated in your thinking.

I think it just helps to immerse yourself in one field in really States like, uh, one of the things I do is real estate transactions, mostly residential. And you know, if you call yourself a real estate lawyer, which I'm sure it's an extent, both of us do that, they're still completely different. Practice areas.

So, you know, if someone came to me for commercial lease, I'll refer them to you. Cause there's still a certain area of specialty and, and, um, you're not expertise in what you do. So, um, you know, I, how did you narrow it down, obviously from your experience at your first house job, but beyond that, it's still a very formal specialization and, uh, it sounds like it's, it's, you know, it's advantageous.

Well, yes. And I would say my first job was in house as a tenant lawyer, but my second job was in house as a landlord lawyer, where I went to a landlord company that was the joint shopping center portfolios of Triassic and Grammarly. And they called that company tri lead and they owned Yorkdale and Scarborough town center.

And, um, Family city center and stuff out in calc area and all over the country. And so I then learned about standard lease forms and what landlords are trying to accomplish and in both the first and second job. So what I learned that's really important is you have to be valuable. To the user. So your client is the user of the product that you create and you have to help them with something that they need that doesn't bore them to tears or go on and on.

I gotta be. Useful. So we were, and then sick of how does this get interpreted when someone just to some water, the words that can be used to support the claim that either party is making and what are the mechanisms of enforcement? What can you do to right the ship? Something is going off the rails. And I think being in house was really instrumental in my development.

Then having to go straight to the coin dependent side, the landlord side, I got to see that business largely operates without loss. It just operates and, you know, laws kind of the bumper guard. You're there to make sure that people don't go off the bumper guards, but you're also not critical. What's critical is revenue.

In other things, but, so I would say that if you're trying to figure out where to start your career or how to develop as a lawyer and focus on being competent in a particular field that you choose, but also useful, and you can't just, um, know your subject matter, you have to know how to apply it. So it's to me because the law is so dense and challenging, it's a bit risky to be a generalist.

I would rather be given my nature. I'd rather go a lot about one thing top to the bottom and every possible spinoff of it that would make me feel more confident in these vice I guess, and in the services I provide. Right. I, I hear that that's that's if you can, you know, make a living in Boulder, a niche that's that sounds like the way to go.

Um, right. And then actually after that second job, I then joined a large law firm that had 13 lawyers doing nothing but leasing. So, yeah. And then my law firm that we've now got going, we have, well over 10 of us who focused on nothing but leasing. So it's possible, you know, you just have to find that lane, but you can get into and then work it.

Right. So how long were you at that firm for before you decided to go on your own? And do you want to talk about what precipitated that. Yeah. So that was, um, so from 85 to 80, 87, I was at frustration. Haircutter is 87 to 89. I was at trolley centers and then 89 to 94. I was a Goodman in car. And so in the time that I was.

87 to 89 at tri Lee. I had negotiated opposite some lawyers at Goodman and car. And similarly, when I had been at first choice hair cutters. So I knew that they were, um, they had a presence in commercial policing. I didn't know very much, but, um, I had some fields opposite them, and then I heard that they were looking for someone.

And so. I had not been hired back articling students at Campbell Godfrey Lucas. And I was convinced that downtown Toronto King and van lawyers were highfalutin better than me and I didn't fit. So there was no chance that I was going to make it at King and Bay. But these guys were looking for a lawyer.

And so I was talking to one of them and they said, well, why don't you come in for an interview? Sure. And the meantime I called, one of my friends who's had been hired by Campbell Godfrey and I said, Oh my God, I've got a job interview and believe it, I'm done, Dave, what should I say? What do I need to know what's going on?

And she said, don't accept a contract position. I don't know what you mean by that contract position. Large law firms will always give people a contract because they just want to see if they can use you. And if they want to get, let go of you, then they don't have any obligation to you. So it's easier for them, but it's riskier for you.

So. Just if they need you, that they hire you on a full time basis. And this is what's different. It's still a full time job. She said, I don't know they are going to fire you as readily when they've given you a full time job. Right. And they'll try and figure out how to redeploy you if a particular practice area or for any reason they need to shuffle the deck.

So ask for a full time job. Okay. But I'm nobody and I don't. I think I could possibly ask for that. And she said, just us. So I went to the first interview as well, and I. Said, you know, I would rather have a full time position at a contract position and they said, okay, well, we'll see what we can do about that.

And then I got an offer. Didn't even have a second interview. They got an offer. So I landed there. I was there from 89 to 94 and they represented landlords and tenants. So it was great work. I was on both sides and I didn't have any clients. I didn't know the first thing about business development. I just knew how to do stuff.

And I was prepared to work hard. I was single and I just really leaned into it as the expression goes, right. We had a feminist group there and I discovered that actually female lawyers were second class citizens. And I didn't know about that till then. So when I had been in house at trolley, when lawyers were half female or more than half female, when I was interested in circuit, as I was the only lawyer I was female.

And so when I got to Goodman a car, suddenly there were women agitating for. Maternity leave and for equal opportunity in terms of the work they were doing and for pay equity, all these things hadn't even crossed my horizon. I didn't know that they existed. Then I went through my own hashtag me too experience, which was really awful.

And, um, I also got some great work, uh, doing. Things with bankruptcy, insolvency working on the federal bankruptcy and solvency commission advisory group. So I was, uh, learning a lot and in a bit of the dragon stand all at once. And I had, um, in 19, the one that invited to the partnership in 92, I had my first child.

The economy had gone wonky. So they changed my offer of partnership from being a non-equity partner to sorry, from being an equity partner to a non-equity partner, which just meant I didn't have to put any capital in. And I see a radically had second class citizen. I was alerted to the fact that the only people who had been offered equity partnerships of that class who had been subtly thrown this wrench where the men and the women were.

Assigned to, or relegated to the non-equity category. I don't care. I've got to say I was a partner with a capital P and apparently I was going to earn something that was similar to what they were earning. It was guaranteed. I didn't know what any of that meant, or my parents were very proud that I was a partner.

I got very head. My first child got my. 16 weeks of mat leave a lot of, yeah, well that was a lot back in the day and that had just been hard one and there was a maximum two children you were allowed to have. We would choke among the women's group that they're paying us to have children. And I didn't really get the joke.

I really did not clue in to how, um, We had to fight for any type of fairness, any type of recognition. They felt that in the 16 weeks that you were away from work, the men who were doing the work were gaining experience that you weren't gaining. And they were there for more entitled to be partners and more entitled to more pay and better rules because they didn't step off.

And it wasn't fair to them. To pay us while we were off on the leaf, or it wasn't fair to them to elevate us as partners when our time came, because we hadn't been there as long as they had considered that we were going to have two children each cause they were paying us to have them. We would then have had a total of 32 weeks away, but those men would never have had.

And yet those men had to be there and had to work and they got to be partners because they earned it. Whereas we got to be partners with others and all that seemed, you know, Very complicated and, uh, chewy. And I thought maybe they were right and I wasn't deserving. So I had my first child in 92 and came back and then, you know, absolutely no work.

It was terrible at 93 and shop as an industry is falling apart. Then I had my second child in 94. Well, when I came back to work in June of 94, I had landed my first two clients. And the second one, the first one was Tim Horton's and the second one was Hazelton lanes. The second one said, we need you to come back here and process these documents because we're having trouble and built, seem to be managing with the other team that's around.

So can you get back early? So I came back a week earlier and, uh, Um, by the fall, I was still pumping milk. My baby was born in February. I was back at work in June and that was, I don't know, September. And they had decided that the whole firm needed to be re structured. And so they wanted to be less heavy and real estate and more heavy and litigation and bankruptcy, insolvency, and that type of thing.

So they came around asking everybody exactly what their. Prognosis was for their role in the front. We each had to present ourselves and defend ourselves. You know, my partner, Dennis, who had been terminated from the partnership, although he was still there, something space from them. So I'm thinking to me and said, Who are you and where do you fit in?

And what's your future here? And I said just a minute. No, it's good. I'll come and talk to you. I, uh, sat down and explained to them that I had now my first two clients ever, I had been practicing for 10 years now. I had two kids now I was ready to really launch. I knew my stuff and I was actually. Island learning the concept of this development.

I also said I had been on the federal bankruptcy and solitary advisory committee and I had, you know, gaining a little profile there. I was the co-chair of the ICRC law conference. And so that was also getting a little industry profile and was making submissions to industry on that front. And I felt like I really was poised and they said, that's nice, 150 hours of billable time next month.

Right.

150 hours next month, or will it reduce your pain? I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I didn't know how I was going to get 150 hours. There were no longer just the RSPB had wasn't that kind of work. But I didn't understand that this, this model, and I now understand that this is not a very well, I mean, it makes sense.

You need to have revenue. You can't just pay people without revenue in this room was looking for right venues. So they're trying to figure out who was going to generate it and what the new future was going to look like. So to their credit, they were trying to get each of us to. Figure out how we were going to plug into a business that would be viable.

And instead I walked around the house, I said, what are you still doing here? Apparently they terminated your partnership. You see? Well, yes, I was an equity partner. And so they terminated my partnership and they're trying to take it out of their lease for the new building that they're going into. And, um, um, one of the roleplayers there, they thought it would be best if I were on the sideline.

So I'm out, but I'm actually just hearing some subtenant and you know what? It's fine. I have very few expenses and I still have all the same work. Generating it and then billing it and then paying myself and perfectly. All right. Why do you ask? And I said, well, because they're telling me that I have to bill 150 hours next month.

And I don't say I'm going to build 150 hours. There's just no work to be had, but I do have these two clients and you know, there's a little bit of work. No worries near 150. And, uh, so I'm thinking that maybe I'll go out of my own. Cause you know, I have skills now and I have some business development ability and my mom and dad always wanted me to hang up my own shingles.

I think I'll try that. I don't know. I'm just trying to figure out how you do it. And he says, well, this is how it's done. If you want to do that with me. Cause the two of us go somewhere together. Absolutely. Sure. So we went looking for space. Dennis did a lot of work for Cadillac Fairview. He had been in house with them for a number of years, so that was his main client.

And so we submitted, we should rent space in a Cadillac Fairview building. That's a good idea. So off we went to the Cadillac Fairview head office at 20 queen West in Toronto, and they had 1100 square feet on the sixth floor. And we, so let's take that. And so we decided to dove, we had a third partner, a partner, a guy in the municipal law section because in the car wanted to be a litigator.

And he joined us at the beginning. We took the space and we started in January one, 1995. And we had no way of knowing, knowing that the industry was just finally going to come out of the doldrums and we rode the wave. So we just got started when the industry came back to life. Well, it sounds like it's been a great success since then.

Uh, in with incredible growth, um, just about your experience and, you know, I'm sure a lot of people, I know a lot of lawyers have been laid off since COVID do you know, do you have a suggestion for them? You know, just because you could get laid off. If you work at a firm or they can impose it, these 150 hour conditions on you, when you have a newborn baby at home, do you suggest that people, you know, try for employment or if they can, are you all for.

Going out on your own. I mean, that's sounds like it's been great success for you with the freedom and lifestyle that came along with it. Well, none of us has a crystal ball and I look back and say, boy, am I lucky? We started in 1995. If we'd started in 1993, I thought we would have bumped along. And our bank would have been upset with us for, you know, no revenue and lots of expenses.

And so, you know, we got lucky. I would say that anybody in the COVID era who got laid off should be asking themselves, how did they feel about their skills? How did they feel about there tastes for risk? I mean, when I said, Dennis and I are going to start this from, I didn't decide that on my own with Dennis, I went home and I said to hubby, uh, here's a problem.

They want me to build 150 hours next month. That's impossible. They're going to reduce my pay. I know what that means. We've got a mortgage here. Um, I sorta think that I've got skills and I sort of think I've got a couple of clients and I don't know where this is all headed, but I mean, it don't need to generate a lot to just keep things going, look at what Dennis has to say.

This is all you need to do. We did some back of the napkin calculations, you know, minus the expense of this minus expense of that minus the expensive rent. Like it's possible that you could end up in the same place, but. If we don't end up in the same place, the worst thing that happens is we can't afford the house.

We have to go live in an apartment, but we'll still have each other also have the kids. So he said, go for it. I totally get it. I mean, you don't want those people breathing down your neck, telling you that you have to go 150 hours and then there was the whole. Hashtag me too thing that had never sat well with him and he was annoyed with him.

And so we said, let's just get you out of that place and see what happens. Now. I had the support of him and he was a teacher. So we do that. We'd always have, you know, decent medical, dental, all of that coverage because of his job. Um, I would say that. I'm also from Sue Saint Marie. So if all else fails, we could pull the plug and go back to live in sushi and Rayburn real estate with you a lot less expensive.

So in the back of my mind, I had safety valve, but I can't so that I could advise anybody right now, what to do. First of all, there's so much uncertainty, but I don't believe that anything lasts forever. So if you have confidence in yourself and there are skills that you can bring and you don't mind taking a chance, you know, there's a lot of.

So the opportunity that comes out of the ashes and why not try to take a job somewhere, then I would say, take a job in an organization that you research well, because you want them to be whole people who treat you like a human being, the check, the paycheck to be reliable, and you want. Really the work to be something that you can handle.

It doesn't need to be in the best work. It doesn't need to be the most scintillating. I'm a firm believer that you have to put food on the table and go with the operation, sort of insist on having things your way. It would be great. If we all got to the exact scintillating practice area that we had dreamt of most of us hadn't jumped as much.

We're just trying to make up the thing and make it go with it. So I wouldn't say that you should hold out for your dream job. Right? I absolutely agree with everything you said, including it's a matter of risk tolerance. And, uh, I'll just even emphasize that, uh, I think the secret sauce is that self confidence that you mentioned.

If people really believe that they have value to offer, then nothing should stop them. Well, I didn't have it at year one or two or four eyes or, you know, and it took me quite a while to feel that I knew my staff and I could talk about it with confidence and that I knew enough to go to a meeting and recommend a course of action and try to win some business.

That doesn't happen that easily. I mean, Maybe people are good at bluffing. I wasn't. Right. Well, each, each person at their own stage. And when I heard you speak about your in house experience, uh, you know, that's also in a way just jumping in and taking on a serious role and just a sink or swim that's that's right.

I didn't know that it was a serious role. I thought it was just a opportunity to get my job, you know, I would never have been able to foresee the learning experience that it turned out to be. Absolutely. I mean, your, your confidence has to be realistic, but, uh, it's also required. Um, I'll just mention that my last interview was with, uh, Donald KA and he was, yeah.

Very interesting. So nice to hear it from your point of view, as a, as a partner at the firm. And, uh, he mentioned a lot of interesting things, but one of which that he was involved in, the innovation of the  lease a massage that was during your time at all. Um, or if not, you know, like leases commercial leases, uh, to be stable, uh, no one wants changes, you know, from a, from a business point of view.

So. The question is, have you seen other innovation at all in commercial leasing? Uh, he, he mentioned the percentage lease, but anything else beyond that? I'd have to think about that for a minute, but I would have to sit at Donald cars. I'm going to bet two boats, 30 years, my senior, and he had been, um, Oh, very established real estate practitioner long before I showed up.

And I'm sure that he invented a lot of what most of us work with. Um, there've been a lot of adjustments to industry changes. Um, retail in particular is very creative.

Some of the systems and processes have changed a lot where people go straight to lease and there's. Generally as a sophistication in the community that didn't exist a long time ago. And so you have sort of an ability to finish each other's sentences if you've been in the field at all. And that, that tends to lead to a lot of shortcut tent, a lot of use of standards.

The step down this, a lot of quick shorthand ways of getting to results. And so if you are going to play in this sector, you've got to be nimble and you got to know this stuff, right? Yeah. I think in our day we were learning a lot. As we went along, there was a lot of new case law being laid down. There was a lot of stuff like Goodyear and Burnham's harp that came along and, um, The new bankruptcy legislation that came along and CC AA that was invoked for the first time.

There was, uh, just generally a development in the law, around everything from provisions of the commercial tenancies act and how they interplay with leases to, um, the way people contracted. So I transacted, so I, it just seems to me that now there's so much more knowledge. And you have to stay abreast of it.

You need probably good four to six years to absorb it before you can contribute any sort of insight into deal-making. And that was a very different landscape when Don Carr came along. And I must say too, that, that whole Goodman and car era with Goodman and Don Carr were exemplary lawyers and gentlemen, they were just really salt of the earth and our, I suppose.

And so it's, it's a shame that the firm, uh, where it did and then it imploded that was long before. Long after I left and those guys were long before I joined, but they were still there when I was there and they were. Significant professor emeritus type layers. I couldn't agree more that Donald comp has to my interactions and discussions with him is a real mantra.

A good man. So, um, I have a couple of questions about your practice, right? Um, is there a use for technology and what is the use for technology and in other areas of law, uh, real estate transactions, there's due process, which really helps with the, with everything to do with the transaction and, you know, and it States there's other sort of software that helps with that.

Is there such things in, in commercial real estate, was it, you know, does TV contract based. Um, I think that our dirt lawyers have some systems. I'm talking about people who buy, sell finance. They have some systems, but I do think most of it is word processing based. And there may be some templates that feed each other in the.

A traditional commercial real estate work. And particularly in work, that's mass produced lots of volume on thinking about, um, Condos, which is not commercial, although it is commercial on my side, there isn't much that we can do. Yeah. Except to try to get standard templates and standard clauses and have them coded in ways that make sense to the user users and accessible in check to our firm, tried to do a document management system that was rolled out by Worldox or, you know, to.

I manage or any of those systems. And we discovered it doesn't really lend itself to commercial leasing. It's just a lot of documents that are searchable, but they're not organized in the way that we organize them. That in our cases, both client driven in standard form for ourselves driven. So it's really a lot of, uh, word processing.

And then unfortunately, if there's a new developments of the law and you want to. I address it with the standard clause. You have to roll that out in a million places. And I think a lot about whether there is some type of a system of standard documentation that could be more automated and maybe built on a database and not in word processing.

And I have that math degree and I have a little bit of a pension for computers, science stuff. And I was one of the original lawyers who typed back when lawyers weren't supposed to type. Um, and I still can't see a path, so I haven't seen others do it either. There's a lot of talk and people love to talk about.

Um, the blockchain, I think that's very misguided as it relates to real estate. I mean, I can see that there are jurisdictions in the world that are, uh, not yet organized. Yeah. And so you could start a fresh with a blank slate. To maybe take some chunk of data and cement it and then let the data interact with the data, which is the premise of blockchain.

But I don't see how you would do it in the realm of the North American land registry system and the way people transact and I've wanted this. Faculty of Georgetown university law centers, advanced commercial leasing Institute, where we host a, I invitation only conference once a year in Washington, DC lawyers are invited from all over North America and it's a bit of a think tank.

Uh, we find that nobody has found the sophisticated way of using some type of artificial intelligence. To do anything that's really meaningful. It isn't there yet. And we don't know how anybody would call it, invent it because they'd have to presume some sort of desire for uniformity. And there isn't that everyone wants to negotiate.

Interesting how they could be room for tech and just got to find, find out it could be YouTube, just a follow up question to that is how do you think COVID has changed things? You know, probably quite dramatically slowed down and everything and, you know, tail end of that, how could things be improved?

What would you like to see going forward? Well, uh, I'm sorry to say, because this isn't what everyone else is saying. We're super busy. We haven't slowed down. We've gotten busier through COVID because of the impact on landlords and tenants and businesses generally. And there's a lot of analysis around what to do.

What's viable, uh, a lot of negotiating renegotiating interpreting, analyzing advising. So, um, I think what we don't know is close when the dust settles, there's a thing. What the new work will be like right now. It's the same old work. It's one of the reasons I said, you know, I like specializing this field is there's a lot of buildings out there.

There's a lot of land out there. It gets used as people go in and out of real estate all the time. And so that's the action. You just need to be near the action. You need to get to know people who are. Buying selling and financing or in our case, leasing or D leasing, expanding, shrinking there's documents associated with that.

So I can't say I have any clue how COVID is going to impact us a year from now. To the extent that our practice was reliant on retail for about the first decade of its existence. That's no longer the case. We've done a lot of office and industrial and every other type of, um, so there's, there's a lot of work.

Good to hear. And do you think things could be improved in one way or another? Mmm. Things could be improved always. Yes. I think they can be improved it. The question is what's the priority. I don't know that anybody knows that. Um, at the moment it seems survival is the priority. So just generally an emphasis on what do we do to, uh, keep the old format of business.

Alive and well in whatever way, until we can figure out what the new format of business looks like. And so, you know, we tend not to be drivers where we react to what the industry seems to be doing, and we keep our ear to the ground and we contribute in terms of saying, this is what we're hearing that others are doing, but we don't lead the way.

Right. So, I mean, you talk about leading right? You're you're leading a firm, you have associates and partners, um, who work with you. You're, you know, when something like COVID happens or just in general, can you talk about the leadership role and you know what it's like managing a firm in general, but also in such, you know, a transition or your transitionary times.

Well, there's been a lot of stepping up first came to be, we were in our offices, wondering if we were going to be told to leave our offices. And many of our people wanted not to come in. So as a group, we said to anybody who doesn't want to come in, doesn't have to, we understand and, uh, you know, listen to what the authorities are telling us.

He got interesting. When the authorities told us that law firms were on the list of essential workplaces, it meant we didn't have to close. So then having no architects body telling us when to reopen, to think for ourselves as to when to call people back. And so everyone stayed away for quite a long time, but I didn't, I went to the office every day because I found it stabilizing and there was no one there to contaminate me except for a few other coworkers who all just prefer being there.

And so we had about five or seven of our 40 people there. So the first month or so, and then gradually we started wanting to come in and put in a day here and there to get caught up there, working from home as well as they could. But many of them found that aggravating with health issues who had no choice in wanting to work from home to be safe.

And that was fair. And there were people who were. Just waiting to be told it was okay to come back and to tell them it's really not on us to tell you, except we think it's a good idea if you do get back. So there were constant conversations. We had town hall meetings. We had discussions around. What did this mean for the future of our firm?

Did we have to do some human calculus and think about layoffs and so on? We quickly decided that that wasn't the way we wanted to proceed. It was more important to us to find a way to manage. And, uh, so we kept, we sent a early notice out to everyone saying, there'll be no layoffs, and we're going to make this work somehow by hook or by crook.

Well partners didn't take draws. We just did everything we could to figure out how we were going to function. And then gradually a bit of a path emerged. And by the middle of may, we were saying, well, we really ought to have everyone come back in. So by the beginning of June, we had people coming in on an every other day basis.

Some people came in day. I had never stopped. Um, And there were many people who were breathing a sigh of relief. They were allowed to come back in. It was so interesting. So we now have a, I think a bit of a status quo where we have on a given day, about 25 of our 40 people in the office, everybody's distancing, we've got all the rules about how many people can Sienna in the kitchen or in a boardroom.

When you know, we do a lot of disinfecting all day long. It's a common touch surfaces. So the leadership there has been collaborative on my firm is now in its 26th year. And, um, there's a next generation of ready to run the firm when the others get out of the way. And we're all gradually exiting. So that next generation has been, you know, um, Heard as well and expressing their leadership.

We have weekly partners meetings where we had them quarterly before, or we talk about what to do and who's doing what and so on. We have section meetings, the leasing section, the litigation section, the real estate section. Everybody meets weekly. Talk about who's doing what, who needs, what help. Yeah. When secret came along, which was a commercial real estate event assistance program from the sheds.

Everybody had to understand how that works. That's familiar very quickly. And our youngest associate lawyer became the experts. So leadership has come from everyone, but it's been all hands on deck. Everybody really has tried to figure out how to be useful. And nobody's tried to shirk responsibility, right?

Not nothing like working with a good team supportive team. It's like that family we mentioned at the beginning when you have good colleagues. Yeah. Right. And it's not like we're all at agreements all the time, but we're all constantly in dialogue. That's the main thing is, you know, As my youngest son said to me the other day, there's value in conversation just in its, in and of itself.

Right. So constant, constant conversation and communication. I'm a big fan. Absolutely. Um, I, I asked, uh, you know, you've been a lawyer for such a long time and, uh, now running your own firm for such a long time. And I alluded to at the beginning, the amount of publications that you pump out every year and speaking and giving back, if you will, do you have any sort of.

Key to that longevity. Uh, well I think you have to show up every day. So absolutely every day you don't take a powder. You say, what can I do today? And you look in that mirror and say, if it's going to be it's up to me and off I go, No, that's, that's critical from the writing and reading and learning. And so on, um, perspective.

I think it's all, again, just dogged determination. Um, mostly in my case, I'm motivated by it. It's your failure. So I. Wants to not fail and whatever that looks like. It means usually trying hard again each day to not fail. And that includes it's reading the law, understanding the law, writing about the law.

I do less of that now, um, because in my. Sort of marriage role, I guess I'm trying to encourage the next generation to roll up their sleeves. And so I tend to add it more than I should. That's no fun for them. Cause I have a heck of a red pen. I would say that, uh, I'm always encouraging them to gain insight and share it.

And. To noodle it out, spend time thinking. I mean, I was telling you about how I had my first child in 92. I remembered that I was supposed to prepare a manual for some, how to deal a procedural guy, to responding to tenants requests for granting and security. It was for a landlord client who no longer exists that portfolio was sold.

But anyway, that landlord client. Expected me to produce that guideline. And I had not done it, not done it. I've done it in my senior partner at Goodman car was seeing, where is it? Where is it? And I was delinquent. And then I rolled in on every day weekend in my third trimester, I sat down in my office for.

48 hours or whatever it was and finished that damn guidelines. Cause it was due, it was past due and I needed to grapple with all the law and I needed to go off with all the concepts and I had to make it organized. And I had so much, I had to pull together, but. It didn't matter if it was labor day weekend, and I had to get it done.

So you sacrifice a lot as a lawyer in terms of personal time, but that's just part of being a professional. I wouldn't say that it's worth it. It's just the responsibility of being a professional. Right? You owe your governing body, the duty, do your best and so on and took that oath. Yeah. Is there anything you look back on your career and any part of it and you think, wow, that was a really good investment.

Uh I'm I'm happy on my death decision. Anything stand out. Oh, for sure. The best decision was to start my own firm. There's nothing in comparison to that. Everything else kills in contrast to that, but in terms of the decision to invest in, um, Maybe something more of a capital, uh, set. Uh, our firms started in that small space.

I mentioned on the sixth floor of 20 queen West, and we grew to the rest of the floor, but it was not the best layout. And then, uh, our lease was coming to an end at the end of our 10 years and we knew we needed a little more space. And so we relocated to the 30th floor of our building. And it was big to take on that much space.

We had a lot more space than we needed, and it was a big layout and a big photocopy room, big filing cabinet system. Everything was grand in my estimation. And I felt like we were. Placing a bet on ourselves at that point. I think it was a good bet. It was. I think you should present yourself as confident that you believe in people see that you believe in yourself may believing YouTube.

So that's yeah. You mentioned the risk and the confidence before, and it sounds like you had it when you went on your own and upgraded and you had to fold the spice and pay the rent. Yeah. That's that's yeah. Good. Ultimately investing in yourself and your future and your firm, uh, you know, pays off in the long run.

Um, if you, um, I would like to add one more thing and that's in investing in people. So, you know, the people that are for many of them have been with us for over 20 years. Um, there's only three of us. Who've been there, the whole 25, Dennis, my assistant and me, and we have, uh, All we said to ourselves that we're not only in the business of practicing law and in the industry of commercial real estate, but we're in the business of providing jobs.

And so we have to take that responsibility very seriously. We have to make sure that the people we select are. No good players who want to be on the team. And we also want to make sure that we reflect to them how valuable they are to us. So we do whatever we can to let them know that they're valued and to encourage their development and to support them in whatever ways are necessary.

And fact is an investment that. Is huge because if you ever have to deal with the cost of turnover, you know, it's extremely expensive in ways that can never be quantified. So investing in people with me and, you know, and on that note, when we noticed that we were all getting older and we needed to not face a future, in which one day someone will turn off the lights, we said, let's go recruit the next generation of young leaders to replace us.

And so we've done that and that's been an exceptional, um, Transition for us to bring along a generation of leaders who are going to continue the firm after the elders are gone. And, you know, they may not keep it under the same name, but I know that there won't be anybody turning out the lights and, you know, signing the last severance pay package.

There will be jobs. There will be offices. I don't know what I post COVID or footprint is going to look like, but it's yeah, that's, that's very, uh, mature to be able to think of the next generation and, uh, you know, succession ultimately, um, a question when you're hiring somebody, uh, especially for these roles of perhaps taking over for the next generation.

If you take out the experience aspect, because obviously you want to hire someone with commercial real estate experience. If you're, let's say talking about a first year grad or whatever it is, what, what kind of traits are you looking for? Perhaps even a, a C an associates, but without that commercial leasing experience, all else being equal, are there any traits that you look for that would really help you make a decision one way or the other.

Well, we like them to be affable and, um, people who write well speak well, or we like them to have, um, some sort of experience outwardly where they are social, not necessarily your areas and the most expansive personality, but it doesn't necessarily work in our line of effort to be. Excessively studious and quiet.

I think that's maybe some areas of law are given to that type of personality. Our personality needs to be someone who is inclined to go and be sociable and also inclined to read. And, um, On a subjective. So we're looking for people who aren't entirely bookish, but also who aren't, um, Salesforce. And then, you know, because of the commercial leasing side in particular being so detailed, so many little details to capture, that's the hardest thing.

Figure out on a few interviews is whether somebody has a pension for detail. That's so interesting that each area will comes with a perhaps certain personality trait that is most fitting. Um, I mean, there's, there's obviously some flexibility and overlap, but you, you could make such a generalization. I agree.

And I, I know what you mean. Um, I'll end with one more question. Cause I thank you for your time up until now it's been a good chat and as a last message. So to speak, if you had a billboard or a publication, uh, that you could, um, you know, millions of people are going to see in a public place and you can put a sentence or a quote or anything like that on it.

Is there anything that comes to mind that you'd like to share with the world? Oh my goodness. That is a challenging question. Um, I think that I would have to say play to win. That would be my motto. I'm not at all costs, but I would say that the message that I would put out there, especially for women is it's not play, not to lose and not just get by, but really put yourself there and go for it.

So my, my billboard, I guess if that's true, I can four would say played a win. Thank you for that Natalie insightful answer. Is there any last words you want to share with us before we let you go? Well, I would like to address some of the moderate, um, issues that are swirling around the black lives matter movement is important to me.

And, um, you know, the quality of living in the profession, uh, women are unequal in the profession they need, maybe they're in. The representation at the beginning, but they're not there as time goes on. And it's because the profession isn't very kind to us. When we have children, it's not accommodating, it's not accepting.

And women themselves all lucked out. And I think that's a problem and it needs to be fixed. I would say that I don't have any solutions to offer, except that I think all of us should know it's our collective responsibility to make the profession more welcoming to women. And they're going to have children.

It's only because the men can't, everybody's got to have them and we should have them in our profession. So, uh, that's something that's on my mind a lot, and I think that's, um, it is the other thing that's on my mind, that's more currently around the topic of diversity inclusion and that is that our profession has not lived up to its, um, Filling in terms of, you know, liberal thought and, um, being a Galvin Tarian in the sense that we have not reduced the barriers to entry to our profession for many people who are of color and who come from backgrounds that don't give them the leg up and we need to give them the leg up.

So I would say it's a. It's something that's constantly on my mind, our firm has done something in terms of establishing a scholarship that's Ryerson university for the law school. That's just starting there and we're going to try to create better access with the annual awards to a student who identifies as racialized.

And we're hoping that other law firms are going to do similar things. And that collectively the legal profession will recognize that it has systemically prevented. Women and people of color from succeeding. And we need to fix that. Yeah, I agree. And, uh, you know, my, my background being South African, I have family that sat in jail, uh, fighting apartheid and, uh, I'm also a foreign licensed lawyer, NCI candidates.

So I know what all those NCA students are going through. You mentioned the, the rice and law program. Those people will to have a. A bit of an uphill battle and I'm all for equality and equal opportunity because a lot of times people with diverse backgrounds have even a lot more to offer than a locally groomed lawyer.

So, um, you know, I look forward to working, you know, for that as well, too, to help an out profession. I think our professors should reflect our society. We are making a big mistake to. To repeat the patterns we have to break the pattern. I couldn't agree more. Well, Natalie, thank you very much for your time.

I appreciate it. I think our discussion has been insightful and I look forward to continuing it with you. You're very welcome. I really appreciated the time together and I hope it's beneficial to whoever your audience is. And to you.

Thank you for listening to the end. If you need to reach me, I'm at Charney legal dot C A, that’s CHARNEYLEGAL.CA, the home of this podcast. I'm Avi Charney. I look forward to seeing you on the next one. Bye for now.