Episode 7 - Vivian Li (MacDonald & Partners LLP)

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We are thrilled to have Vivian Li on our podcast. She spoke at our Beyond the A event that we hosted over at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and we have invited her back to join us on the podcast. Vivian is a family lawyer with MacDonald & Partners LLP and serves on the board of the Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers Ontario.

Q: If you were to write a letter to yourself when you started practising law, what would you say in that letter?

I was stuck in a bad job for way too long because it was a comfortable paycheck, but I wasn’t learning anything.  I would tell myself “Don’t do it for the money because (a) it is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things (b) what is most important when you are young is to get in as much learning as possible because eventually, I won’t have the same abundance and time.”

My mistake early on in my career is that I was settling.  I stayed somewhere way too long.  It was just too easy and I wasn’t learning anymore, but it was a good paycheck.  That was the wrong way of approaching my career.

Q: And if you were to write that same letter but before you started law school, what would you say?

I don’t know what everybody else’s law school experience was like, but I felt a tremendous amount of peer pressure.  I went to a party law school and so there was all of this social pressure to go out every single week even though you had classes at 8am the next day.  

Everybody wanted to be a corporate lawyer and it was frowned upon to want to do criminal law, family law or estates law because those areas made less money.  I just wished that I told my younger self to not give a crap about what other people think.  At the end of the day, this is my life.  I am going to have to live with these decisions for the rest of my life.

Also, chasing a paycheck for me personally does not bring satisfaction. The reason that I am in family law now - I didn’t start off in family law - is because I found out that I am genuinely interested in it.

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