The rise of women-led law firms

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The challenges women can face at traditional law firms are well known: pay gaps, burnout, glass ceilings. But what happens when women decide to build something different? And what can all lawyers learn from their experiences? 

Grace Cleveland chairs the Canadian Bar Association’s Women Lawyers Forum; she’s a partner specializing in wills, estates and trusts at Cleveland Doan LLP in White Rock, BC. Aneka Jiwaji co-founded Jiwaji Law, a corporate advisory and litigation firm in Vancouver, with her sister Afshaan. And Erin Cowling is founder and CEO of Flex Legal Network, which connects firms with freelance lawyers.

The host for this episode is Lisa Taylor, a lawyer and professor of journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax.

Links:

• Raising the Bar: Women in Law Project – Canada results report
• CBA Women Lawyers Forum 2026 Conference

Verdicts & Voices is a legal current affairs podcast presented by the Canadian Bar Association. Views expressed are not necessarily those of the CBA.

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to Verdicts & Voices, the Canadian Bar Association's legal affairs podcast. My name is Lisa Taylor. I’m a lawyer and professor of journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax. And on behalf of the Verdicts & Voices team, I offer a big thanks to Alison Crawford, who’s stepping away from the host’s chair after more than 40 episodes. For the rest of the calendar year, I’ll be in this seat, along with a few others, but the podcast’s commitment to delivering legal news and stories about law and the justice system in Canada will not change, so you’re going to want to keep on tuning in.

For generations, much of the conversation about women in law has focused on how women can succeed within traditional law firms. But what happens when women decide to build something different? The CBA's National Women Lawyers Forum recently devoted a conference to women-led law firms. Today, we're exploring what happens when women stop trying to fit into traditional firms and start challenging the assumptions those firms are built on.

Joining me for are Grace Cleveland, chair of the CBA's National Women Lawyers Forum and a partner at Cleveland Doan LLP in White Rock, British Columbia; Aneka Jiwaji, co-founder of Jawaji Law, a Vancouver corporate advisory and litigation firm; and Erin Cowling, who joins us from Toronto. She's founder and CEO of Flex Legal Network, which connects freelance lawyers with firms needing their expertise.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining me.

Aneka Jiwaji

Hello.

Grace Cleveland

Good morning.

Erin Cowling

Hello.

Lisa

Okay. Grace, I would love to start with you and ask why women-led law firms this year? Why was this the focus of this year's conference? I mean, what is it you're hearing from women lawyers about the kinds of practices they want to build?

Grace Cleveland

Well, the Women Lawyers Forum is acutely aware of the problems faced by women in law. There's a lot of content out there, even recently, such as the 2026 report from the International Bar Association, that shows although women in Canada make up 53% of the profession, we still make up less than 35% of partnership in traditional firms. The WLF in 2022 released its own study, actually authored by one of our panelists today, Erin Cowling, and that was the Pay Equity in the Legal Profession report. There we identified a lack of transparency around compensation, inequitable file allocation, and a disproportionate burden of non-billable work for women lawyers, all of which contributes to a clear pay gap in the profession.

Then in 2025, one of our WLF members authored an article that explored how women are leaving traditional big law firms at nearly twice the rate of men. Mostly, that's due to severe burnout, rigid billable hour cultures, the motherhood penalty. And so, of course, as our membership is comprised of women lawyers, I think all of us have seen or experienced these factors, you know, whether that's personally or amongst our peers. But the WLF did not want to do another seminar focused on the problems. We wanted to talk about what women lawyers are doing in response to these problems and how they are building their own tables. So that's how we arrived at the theme of the rise of women-led law firms.

Lisa

Now, Aneka, when you hear this, much of the data and the findings that Grace quotes, these are not new to you, obviously. So this is what you were kind of up against when you and your sister established Jiwaji Law. And I understand that you have a pretty sophisticated litigation practice, but a very different kind of working environment. So what have you broken to come up with a newer, better model for you? What's different in your practice?

Aneka Jiwaji

Yeah, so what I would say is, as Grace was talking… You said, you know, Aneka, you're aware of this, Lisa, when you asked me the question. I was sort of internally chuckling to myself, because I'm not aware of it. I've lived it. And it's the reason that we started Jiwaji Law. So the things that I was aware of and the things that I was thinking about when we started this practice were things like the billable expectations on women that are leading to severe burnout, the disproportionate amount of billable work that women are told to take on with the illusion that it's going to lead to partnership, which seems to never happen, the culture around giving big bonuses to people who are doing the big hours. Those are things that we don't do at our firm, and we do that intentionally, because we have taken what is traditional… And we have a very traditional commercial securities litigation practice. We do that, we do tax, we do IP. It's very male-dominated fields.

And I think we've been sold that the practice of those areas has to look a certain way, you know, it has to be the big hours and the traditional way that we've always practiced law. So we looked at it and said, well, what do we like about practicing law? And I'm speaking from a litigation perspective, because that's all I've ever done. And I said, you know, I like going to court. I like doing sophisticated work. I like doing it in a sustainable amount. And I like doing it with people that I enjoy. And those people happen to be women. And that's not to say that I don't enjoy any men, but on the whole, when I'm running a complex litigation file, I find women to be more collaborative on those files, and we have a really good time working together.

So we took all the things that we didn't like and we got rid of them, and we kept all the things that we do like. So, you know, we still do the sophisticated legal work. We are an all-women team. We have a cap on billable hours. And when I say a cap, I mean it's a hard cap. We expect everybody to do the maximum of 1,600 hours, and that is a true maximum. I think complex commercial litigation, the work that we do, is so intellectually taxing, and women have other things going on outside of the practice, and I think that is a good thing. So I would like people to come in at about 1,450, 1,500 hours a year, and that 1,600 is very much a cap.

And my ethos is, if you're doing stuff outside of the billable hour, that is holistic. As women, we are more holistic. We bring, in my opinion, a multifaceted approach to law. And those other hours, that other hundred hours, you could be doing something else. You could be sitting on a board. You could be at home with your kids. We learn so much from mothering and parenting, which is just discounted in the patriarchal system that I grew up in, so I'm trying to bring all of that back in. So I hope that answers that question. But that's the culture that we are trying to build.

Lisa

It's a really interesting insight into one way of doing law that gets past an awful lot of normative expectations that are probably held back an awful lot. Now, Erin, the situation that you have built for yourself is decidedly different and innovative in its own respect. According to Flex Legal Network's external communications, you've grown from three freelance lawyers a decade ago to a network of more than 80 lawyers that serve law firms and legal departments across Canada. There's a million things I find really exciting about that entrepreneurial journey, but one of them was the decision to scale up as opposed to keeping it simple, just you and, say, a half dozen freelance clients. Tell me about that.

Erin Cowling

Yeah, so I started freelancing on my own at first. So, the reason I even brought on the other two was just because I had so much work. I was getting to the point where I'm like, I'm working just as much as I was at a Bay Street firm. This isn't what I want. So I had to bring on other people to help me. And then from there I had to make the decision either to keep it small or grow outside of Ontario, which is where we started. And really it was just the demand at the beginning. We had people in BC saying, I need some BC lawyers, people out east, I want some out east lawyers, Nova Scotia lawyers. And so I just slowly started bringing people on, really to fill the need that was there.

I could have scaled even larger, to be honest. But if I got to that point, I would have had to start looking at investors investing in my company and bringing on some capital. But I made the conscious choice then, no, I didn't want to do that. So yes, I scaled as far as I could. I feel like I can keep scaling, but I wanted to still maintain control over my company. So a lot of people, a lot of male entrepreneurs, are like, why aren't you doing this big startup, and you could be the next, I don't know, whatever. And I'm purposely keeping it where it is because I love my lifestyle. Maybe I'm sacrificing some cash on the table, I could be making more money, but it does not make up for the fact that I control my time, I have my weekends off, I have my evenings off, and I'm growing something that's helping people across Canada.

Lisa

Aneka, when you hear Erin talk about that control of evenings off, weekends off, I get the sense that these are values that you also share, but then there's clients. I mean, what do you do? How do you reconcile these kind of limits that you have set to find balance and to be excellent with clients who have urgent demands that need to be met yesterday?

Aneka Jiwaji

So I have two thoughts. When Erin was talking, I was also again chuckling to myself, because I can't tell you how many people have said this to me. You can build Jiwaji Law into a juggernaut, you know? Don't you want offices all over Canada? Because we're originally from Alberta, and Jiwaji Law was in Edmonton when my dad was running it, before he passed, since like the nineties. And people said, open an Edmonton office, open a Toronto office. And these people are usually men. And, you know, my sister and I say to ourselves, why would we want to do all of those things? We want to keep it in a certain sort of vein, and we like the fact... and yeah, could we make more money? Sure, but not everything is about making money, and that again is a patriarchal way of thinking, right? That everything has to be a capitalistic endeavor, and we can still make money and do something good, and bigger is not always better, you know. So I think that's something else we were talking about at this women's law forum.

And then to your second question, in what I do, I'll be honest, there's not a lot of balance of the evenings and the weekends off. I work all the time. That has not changed. What has changed is my ability to control the type of clients that I work for. I don't work for assholes. When people say we have a no-asshole policy in law, we actually have that. So if clients are going to be disrespectful to our team, not understand the demands that they have outside... like, because we are women, we celebrate things like weddings and birthdays and milestones like that wholeheartedly. And we had one of our associates get married this year, and she took three weeks off, and those were three weeks that she was unplugged from her computer entirely, which, for sophisticated commercial securities litigation, people say, well, how did you let her do that? I didn't let her do anything. That is her time, and it's my job as the person who leads this practice to make sure that I have enough capacity to take care of those things while she's away so that she can really take that time off.

So we really double down on things like our vacation, our mental health benefits. There's a lot of firms who say, you know, everyone should get therapy, okay, well, they're providing, like, $500 a year for therapy benefits, right? Like, who's going to go be able to do therapy or coaching? So we've doubled down on those types of benefits. We've doubled down on taking unplugged vacations so that when people come back, they can come back refreshed so that they can do those evenings and the weekends. And I don't want that to be an every weekend or every evening thing, which is why, again, we cap at 1,600 hours. So if I see that someone's creeping up to that level of time, I'm saying to them, take a week off, take your Friday off. This is getting to be too much time. And it's my job to monitor that.

And part of that is the capitalistic thing, right? There's that little voice in my head, which is all the men I've worked with forever, that say, well, you can make more money if they worked on Fridays. You could make more money if they worked on those days. And I say it's not all about making money. I want women staying in commercial and securities litigation. That's the goal of this firm. It's not only to make money, which is why we do that. We say take that time off. We try to have Fridays, people not doing billable time on Fridays. Friday is a pick-your-own-adventure at Jiwaji Law. If you have something that has to be done, you do it. If you have admin stuff that has to be done, you do it. If you're feeling like your hours are good and things are going well, you take the day off. And no one's going to ask any questions about that. So that's the way that we manage those values, because I do align with Erin on those values. I do think we need to have more of that balance. So how do we do that and still service clients? This is the solution that I've found.

Lisa

Erin, the model that you have developed and grown gives lawyers considerable independence in deciding how and when they work. But how does that business model work for freelancers? What are the trade-offs they have to consider to have this kind of pipeline of work that they can do when and as they would like it to fit around their lives? What's the trade-off for those lawyers?

Erin Cowling

Yeah, so for people who aren't aware of what freelance lawyers are, instead of working for one law firm, we freelance for multiple law firms. So we are not full-time employees. We pick up work when we want to pick up work and we say no when we don't want to do the work. So when I started my own solo practice, I think the major trade-off was you're not getting your paycheque every two weeks. Yes, you can pick up work when you want, but when you're not working, you're not getting paid. And you're basically an entrepreneur from the beginning. You're running your own business, you're doing your own invoices. You can work at 10 p.m. or you can work at 10 a.m. You can work on Saturdays and not on Mondays to Thursdays. So there's a lot of upside, but it's not a full-time job for some people. Through Flex Legal, we have a variety of lawyers who, some want the full-time work and they want as many hours as possible, and then some are like, just give me what you can give me. I have other things going on in life. Either I have elderly parents I'm caring for, or I have children that have special needs, so I'm at SickKids Hospital three times a week with them doing appointments. So I only want a few hours.

And you know what, I see all the upsides of freelancing. I can't think of any downsides other than the unpredictability of work. I guess if you really enjoy working with the end client, you would kind of miss that when you're doing freelance work because you're only working with other lawyers. The lawyers are the ones giving you the instructions and giving you the work. But that sounds very enjoyable to me, not having the end client, which is one of the reasons I started freelancing in the first place. But yeah, I think it's just the unpredictability of the work is probably the major downside. And plus, honestly, sometimes you get a bit of a stigma. People think, oh, well, you're not a real lawyer because you're not doing the traditional litigation. But we're doing just as much legal work as a litigator is. Sometimes we're even in court if we need to be in court. So I think as long as you're secure enough in your skill set and what you're doing, you are obviously a real lawyer.

Lisa

Aneka, when I was listening to you talk about what is different about Jiwaji Law, you seem like someone who will take every challenge and try to build something better and different. But surely some of the attributes of traditional practice were just immutable objects. Were there things that you tried to change, tried to innovate past, and were kind of like, ugh, this really is just endemic to legal practice?

Aneka Jiwaji

To be honest, no. I really have not felt that. I have felt that once we have taken off all the things that we were told it had to look like... I mean, clients are the one thing, right? You need clients, you need paying clients, and clients can be challenging. That's, I think, universal to any type of practice. Client management is a skill that I think every lawyer needs to have. But outside of that, I have not found that. I have found this to be transformative. And of course we're very early days, we're a year into doing this, but every sort of thing where we've said, you know, that's silly, why are we doing it that way, we've been able to find a new solution to it.

For example, we basically do everything now on flat-fee value-based billing, even big complex litigation. And every firm that I've ever been at has said that, well, there's no way of doing that outside of the billable hour for litigation. And it turns out there is, right? You can do phases of litigation. You can say, you know, we've looked at this, we think it's quite complex, it's going to cost you, you know, $100,000 for the factum, and then after that we'll rescope. And we're doing that. So one of the things that I never really loved about practice was that I think I'm quite efficient, and I think the billable hour basically gives people gold stars for being just inefficient enough. Not inefficient enough that it's too much time, but you want to hit the sweet spot of inefficiency. We don't have that problem anymore. We just know we're going to do this factum or we're going to do this hearing or we're going to do this filing, and then we can do it as fast as we want, or take as much time. Sometimes I take more time than the project… because I just know I'm going to be the one up in court speaking on it, and I need more time than what the client is able to pay for, and I'm okay with that, to be able to do good work.

So no, I haven't really found that. One of the things is, of course, we still, you know, every file we have is against a big law firm in town or one of the traditional boutiques. So we are still dealing with their style of practice. But I feel like the lawyering hasn't changed, but the women who work with me have universally said, we have such a calm in the office, because we had not recognized how wonderful it is to practice law without the microaggressions that we dealt with every day. So when you take away the, should I send this email? I wonder if I should send this email, does it sound okay, is the tone okay? And you're doing that internally every day and you no longer have to do that, you have a lot of space and time to focus on actual legal work. So actually, I think that we've found that the traditional part of the legal work has become a lot better and a lot easier when we've taken off all of these other guardrails. So no, it hasn't been my experience that this is all just really hard to change. I just think people didn't want to change it because it benefited a person who looked a certain way, and that wasn't us. And so, yeah, here we are.

Lisa

Grace, as someone who works hard to make sure that you've got a finger on the pulse of what women lawyers are thinking and experiencing, do you think a majority of women lawyers recognize what Aneka is positing here? This idea that, no, we can take all of these structures and we can do them differently. Is that message percolating out to people who are in their early years of practice, who are walking around as perpetual balls of anxiety, wondering if they could be, as Aneka just described it, in an office that feels calm and thoughtful?

Grace Cleveland

I think sometimes you need to see it to believe it. And so for the WLF, we set out really intentionally. We didn't want to just provide a boot camp for this conference. We wanted to feature women from across the country who have built and led these firms. They're thriving in their unique firms. We wanted to include panelists who were solo practitioners, who had small partnerships, who had mid-size and obviously large firms that span across the country. We wanted to include speakers of all ages, of all backgrounds, with diverse lived experiences. And that sort of multitude of voices, I think, was important for us because we wanted to show that there isn't just one way to do this. And here are all these women who are doing it, and you can do it too.

Lisa

When I think about that you-can-do-it-too perspective, I'm wondering, Aneka and Erin, where you found yourselves early in your careers and thinking about what the options were for you. It seems like you've both built spaces where people can have more balance and bring more parts of themselves to work. But that can come at a trade-off. Erin, as you make things better for the people that Flex Legal uses as freelancers, have you been able to achieve the same thing for yourself?

Erin Cowling

To be honest, yes. And sometimes I feel guilty saying this, because you see this image of the entrepreneur who's working all the time and doesn't take a vacation, and they're scaling and whatever. And if I'm not that, am I a successful, quote unquote, entrepreneur? But I made a conscious decision that I was going to really protect my time. And yes, the trade-off may be this is not a multibillion-dollar company. But when I started freelancing, I decided I'm not taking calls after 6 p.m. or looking at my email. I just remember I used to sleep with my phone under my pillow. So if a client called me at 11 p.m. on a Saturday, I would answer it. And I thought, I am not going back to that. So when I started my own company and practice, I said, no phone calls after 6 p.m. I actually deleted my work email from my phone, which is something you can do as a freelance lawyer because your clients are other lawyers. They tend to respect your boundaries when it comes to that.

And clients, I get, they have other things going on, and you may not be able to delete your email or not answer phone calls after 6 p.m. But I mentioned this at the conference. One time I happened to answer my phone, it was like 7 p.m. And the lawyer on the other end was like, my goodness, I'm so sorry, I was going to leave a message, I can't believe you picked up. Because they were so respectful, because the lawyers themselves probably don't want their clients calling after 7 p.m. So I think just setting up… really strict with… letting work come into my own personal space or personal time. Obviously there's emergencies, obviously there's a client who's like, I have a trial on Monday, or a lawyer who has a trial on Monday and my associate's sick, I need someone to come in and pop in. Of course I'll be available for things like that. But just making sure I have my priorities about where work ends and where my family time begins.

Lisa

Aneka, as you listen to that, and as I listen to what Erin is saying there, I'm convinced that you have created a practice at Jiwaji Law for associates to have balance and not be exhausted and stressed. How are you doing at that for you?

Aneka Jiwaji

That I have not figured out entirely yet. But what I will say is, and I'm sorry I keep coming back to this, I always loved to work. I just did. I'm just one of those people, and I think that's okay. And I think sometimes as women, and as women who have children and husbands, we get a lot of flak from that. I spoke at another conference in Toronto the last two days. I travel all the time for work. And I can't tell you how many people say to me, well, what about your son? Who's watching him? And I think… My husband's a lawyer as well. I think, he's got an equal parent at home who is with him, and it is okay. And my husband never gets those questions when he travels.

So I've really leaned into the "I like to work," and I’m really leaning into I think it's okay. And I think more women have to feel that it is okay, because that's where the mom guilt starts, and all of the things that we are told as women that we have to feel. So I think that's the starting point. I remember I was watching, like, Devil Wears Prada 2 or something, and Meryl Streep looked over at Anne Hathaway and said, "Don't you just love to work?" And I said, I don't think anything has resonated with me as much as that little moment. I do love it, but that being said, I love to work the way that I love to work, which is collaboratively with other people who are collaborative and kind and don't have egos. And when you take that out of the equation, you are not burnt out. I don't feel any semblance of feeling burnt out on this endeavor. And it's probably the most I have ever worked in my 11 years of doing complex commercial litigation. So that should tell you sort of everything about it, right? We're on this push, we're speaking, we're flying places, we're doing all of these things to get our message out there, build our brand and our profile. I have a large presence on LinkedIn that takes a lot of time and effort to do. But I don't feel burnt out. I feel very inspired. I keep meeting amazing women like Erin, like Grace, who are also very committed to this cause.

So yeah, I haven't found that balance for myself yet, but I'm very happy for the first time practicing law. I feel very happy doing the things that I'm doing, and maybe that's the balance that it was for me. And I'm okay with the fact that that's not what traditionally women are told balance looks like. And I think we can redefine that. I do find I also spend more time with my family. It's in a weird way, but because I'm happier, I'm not coming home every day being like, today was the worst and I dealt with all of these bad things. I'm coming home refreshed and excited for those hours in the evening with my son and my husband. And I have noticed that my family life has just become exponentially better since I've done this. So that's my balance.

Erin Cowling

Can we just get rid of the word work-life balance? It's not... If you're happy with your work and you're happy with your home, you are happy. You're balanced. Balance is the wrong word.

Aneka Jiwaji

I'm balanced. That's balance for me, you know, and everybody's different. I have a very good girlfriend of mine, I used to work at the BC Securities Commission, I recruited her from private practice to the BC Securities Commission. She is an excellent lawyer. She loves the balance that that in-house role provides for her, and that's great. I don't think any less of her as a lawyer because she's not working the hours that I do. I think she's a baddie, right? But that's how women look at each other, and it's different than how men evaluate each other. And yeah, I don't believe in work-life balance. I believe in whatever makes you happy, and that's unique to everybody.

Lisa

I think about young women who go to law school because they're really interested in the intellectual challenge of law and then to come up against these professional practices that just do not work for them, and even as they're still studying law, they're looking for the pathway out. Erin, you must have new calls who come to you and say, how can I innovate like you? I mean, it seems like you and Aneka are both in places where women lawyers may wish to show up, but how do they get from here to there? If someone's a 2026 call, what's the path?

Erin Cowling

Yeah. When I graduated law school, if you told me I was going to be a freelance lawyer and have a cross-country freelance law platform, I'd be like, are you smoking something? This does not make any sense at all. First of all, what is that? And there's no way I'm going to start a business. My undergraduate degree is in English literature and women's studies. I can't run a business. So I think my main comment is keep an open mind. There's ways to practice law that have not even been discovered yet, especially with AI and technology and people getting their legal services in different ways. I think, yes, you'll have to learn how to do traditional law at some point, either with a traditional law firm or through a practice like mine, but you do have to practice a bit. But I think just trying not to keep the blinders on and thinking that the way that it's been done before is the way it always has to be. I just... keeping that curiosity alive, I think really helps.

Lisa

I wonder if that curiosity is more likely to come from women lawyers, because Grace, as you enumerated off the top, there are an awful lot of very complex calculations that women lawyers make going into this, about male-dominated norms, about whether or not they have plans to start a family, how all of this balance happens, what work they get to do, whether or not there's value in this work. These can't be conversations just for women lawyers. I mean, others in practice, are they looking towards what the Women Lawyers Forum is talking about and saying, we could use some of this innovation too?

Grace Cleveland

Well, we're sort of hoping that this isn't just a conversation, but that this becomes a movement. And the rise of women-led law firms is not just to benefit women. I think it has the potential to make the profession better for all. And that's what the WLF is all about. Our mandate is working towards making society and the practice of law more equitable for not just women lawyers, but for all lawyers and for all people. So hopefully this conference, this podcast, will have a spiral effect. We definitely at this point are looking at it as just the beginning. We've had so much feedback from the conference, that people just left feeling not just inspired, but also equipped with the practical tools and the kind of thinking and also the connections that I think we can lean on, because that's another part of WLF and I think women in law in general: leaning on one another and having a supportive network that you can call, that you can ask the questions, and that there's no judgment. So that's where we're at. We're looking to the future, and we think it's unlimited.

Lisa

And as we look to the future, and I'll put this to you first, Aneka, if we have this conversation 10 years from now, if we reconvene and look back and say, wow, in 2026 we were still talking about blank, what is that thing that you really hope that a decade from now has changed, has innovated in terms of how lawyers work?

Aneka Jiwaji

I would love to cancel... and I say this having won some of these awards, like Female Trailblazer of the Year, you know, that's at every law awards thing. I know Lexpert has that and all that, and the person who won it this year, when she went on stage, she said, you know, I hope this award does not exist in 10 years. And that really sat with me. I'm like, yeah, you know what? We'll have so many women who are leading their own firms, who are CEOs, who are the managing partner of these big law firms, or whatever that looks like, whatever our benchmark at that point is, that we don't have to have a specific award celebrating a female trailblazer every year, because it is just the norm. Females are just doing it, and I'm seeing more and more of it.

So everything Grace was saying about seeing more and more women just doing this, like Erin was saying, if you had told me 11 years ago... I just thought I would be a partner at one of the firms in town, that was what it was going to look like. I had all the reported judgments and all the little trappings of that little checklist, it was all there. And if you had told me that this is what this would look like, I would have said, what? But it is empowering, and I saw other women doing it. Like, I know she's not here right now, but Sara Forte was at that conference and she spoke, and she was one of the first people I saw as a young lawyer who had gone and started her own firm and had done it so successfully and marketed herself so successfully. So I think, to Grace's point, seeing those people who look like you will hopefully make it so that we don't have that award anymore. We don't need the Female Trailblazer of the Year award anymore. So that's what I'm hoping.

Lisa

Well, first of all, amen to retiring the trailblazer awards. It served a purpose. Let's move past. Erin, what do you think? In 2036, what will we finally have put to bed about traditional models and beliefs about what legal practice is?

Erin Cowling

I guess the traditional sense of what a successful lawyer looks like. I think we still have this idea. People picture this white male equity partner at a big Bay Street law firm, and that is no longer the case. I think, like we were talking about earlier, if you are happy in your work and you're happy in your life and you're practicing law the way you want to practice law, those are the people who should be winning the awards. We're happy, we're great, we're successful. You don't need to be just this equity partner making all of this money. Unless you want to be, as well. But I think we need to have more variety of what, quote unquote, a successful lawyer looks like.

Lisa

Well, I appreciate the three of you giving us more insight into what a successful legal practice or a successful profession in law can look like. Really appreciate you joining me today. Thank you.

That was Grace Cleveland. She's chair of the CBA's National Women Lawyers Forum and a partner at Cleveland Doan LLP. Aneka Jiwaji, co-founder of Jiwaji Law, and Erin Cowling, founder and CEO of Flex Legal Network. And I'm Lisa Taylor. Thanks for listening to Verdicts & Voices, the Canadian Bar Association's legal affairs podcast.