 My name is Patrick Shea. My name is Ian Frédéric Plistinski. Hi, I'm Tatharine McKenna. My name is Tanya DeMello. My name is David Sandamersky. I graduated in 2008 and I'm currently doing my doctorate in law at the University of Toronto. I was Privacy Commissioner of Canada for 10 years. I'm currently the Director of Diversity and Equity at the University of Toronto in Scarborough. I'm the president and the co-proprietary of a visual and animation studio called Digital Dimensions. I'm a partner and a corporate lawyer at Blake Castles and Graydon, a large cane law firm in its Montreal office. I went on to co-found an organization called Canadian Lawyers Abroad, and now I'm running for the Federal Liberal Party to be the MP in Ottawa Center. When I graduated from law school, I was offered a place in one of Canada's large and prestigious law firms. I guess most young lawyers would jump at that, but I said to the partner who was trying to recruit me that I'd chosen to go to basically a women's rights organization in the government. And I was very happy with the choice I made. It gave me a lot of career satisfaction. And finally, I guess at the end, this was recognized as a way of practicing law. So there's non-conventional choices that you can make. So I had kind of an unusual career. I wrote my New York bar and then went off to practice law in Indonesia. When it was almost time to go home, there was an opportunity to go work with the United Nations and East Timor. So I spent a year there. It was in the lead up to East Timor's independence negotiating a treaty. I'm teaching here at McGill in the advanced common law obligations course. McGill really taught me that law was this exciting human endeavor for understanding how human beings work. It wasn't this arcane study of these formal rules that we happen to learn and have to get to know, but really was an expression of the best possible solutions that human beings can come up with for living together. I'm a member of the class of 1999. And right after I finished McGill, I went to New York to work at a very large American cabinet. And one of the wonderful opportunities I had as a McGill law student and soon to be graduate was that the large American law firms who generally did not hire outside of the United States and tended to hire really among 8 or 10 or 15 of the top U.S. law schools treated McGill in almost the exact same way as it did Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Yale, NYU. I ended up leaving the faculty in 2000. Articuled at FASC and Martinao doing mergers and acquisitions financing and a bit of entertainment law. The year I was jumping into a partnership, I decided that I needed to be on the other side of the table and jump in the entrepreneurial world. We're lucky to have a lot of employees in Maryland, in Montreal. And our clients are a little everywhere on the planet, mainly American studios, movies, television, video games, advertising. I was a private life commissioner when the phenomenon of social media, the new technologies really took its toll. And during this period that was very effervescent, we had to apply a fairly neutral law to the new technologies. And I was always aware of my training at McGill, of having me prepared to be flexible, but to be able to tackle problems, turn them around and say there's certainly a solution and not hesitate to innovate in this place. The best of McGill law is that Canadian lawyers are uniquely placed to make a difference in the world. We have common law with civil law, we have English, we have French, we come from a variety of different backgrounds and that we can work in partnership with organizations and governments that need assistance. And that was really the idea behind Canadian Lawyers Abroad. One of the biggest things that drew me to McGill was there was a focus on human rights that I think is taken very seriously here, both in the classroom and in opportunities that McGill is able to provide to students to actually do the work. And the second thing that was really important to me that was life-changing was the dual system. So having learning about the civil law system and the common law system. This constant interplay between two systems that you study repeatedly when you come to McGill encourages you to be in constant dialogue with people. Inevitably the people who have already studied at McGill have this in their bones. They know that to work together is to bring out more than you would by working alone. I think that the most important baggage that has been taught to us at the faculty is not as much the legal baggage as it is that all the way of thinking, all the way of addressing situations, of thinking to alternatives, to argumentation when it comes to different positions, and that follows our whole lives. In terms of language, I have to say I spoke good French when I came to McGill, but I was terrified of studying in French. And I asked a few professors before I even started what they'd advise. And they said, open yourself up to trying. There's a lot of help here, and there's a lot of support. So I took half my classes in French and half my classes in English, and it was extremely challenging. But what I think it did for me was it got me to, one, understand that I could do something that was very challenging. But it got me to also understand the McGill and Montreal community better. I think it also got me to use different parts of my brain in terms of problem-solving and skills. And it's made me able to work in a variety of fields that aren't as open to you if you don't have the diverse language skills. So it's been more than 11 years that I'm very involved in the recruitment level for my office here in Montreal. In fact, two offices. My office today, Breaks, but also my former office in Montreal. It's been 11 years that I'm on the recruitment committee. And each year, depending on the course on stage, it's very, very clear. Not just for those who, like me, come from McGill, but for all the members of the committee, that McGill's students are really among the most sought-after in Montreal and in Quebec. It's recognized by almost everyone as the best law faculty in Quebec. So because of that, whenever we see a McGill candidate, we know that normally, or very, very often, it's someone of very high quality. Five out of six young lawyers that we hired were McGill graduates. And I can assure you it wasn't an epitaphism. The rules are very severe. But McGill graduates were bilingual. They understood civil and common law. Two of them had clerked for the Supreme Court as well. So I was fortunate that all these wonderful people had been well-prepared at McGill and could take up these huge challenges for a young lawyer, like negotiating opposite Google's lawyers from Silicon Valley. I have great role models, like Erwin Kotler, who is one of my profs. And we have a really great friendship and he's a really great mentor. So it's amazing how different people from my time at McGill have come back into my career. I met absolutely fantastic friends at the faculty. I stayed very close, a good name among them. I met my wife at the law faculty. It really is a lifelong membership to a pretty cool club. If you come to McGill and you dive right into it and you embrace this radical idea of legal pluralism and transistemia, you're setting yourself up for a lifetime of broadened horizons and law. You're making yourself incredibly agile, incredibly adaptable. And I think this comes from an almost permanent sense of intellectual curiosity that McGill fosters. Once a McGill law student, always a McGill law graduate.