From leaving home at 16 to building a national class action practice, she details her path to success
For Sylvie Rodrigue, the path to legal leadership is about “planning, stepping outside comfort zones, and seeking champions rather than just mentors.” Rodrigue, partner at Torys LLP and head of its national class action practice, doesn’t just talk about resilience – she’s lived it, from leaving home at 16 to building a career across Canada and founding Torys’ Montreal office.
Rodrigue describes her story in her new book Own It! Lessons Every Woman Should Know. “The book is divided into eight life lessons, and each life lesson has a professional and a personal component,” she says. For her, success means developing as a complete person, not just a professional. “You need to be whole and well-rounded and succeed in both your professional and your personal life,” she says. She describes how, at 16, she was on her own, forced to develop a sense of resourcefulness that would later define her approach to law.
Her move to Toronto, after 14 years practising in Montreal, was a turning point. Rodrigue uprooted her life, leaving behind friends and family, to join her now-husband and blend their families. “From a professional standpoint, it entailed so much more,” she says. She was a civil law lawyer, French-Canadian, without a common law degree, and had to requalify at the bar while entering a blended family with four children under 10. Rodrigue says she broke down the “big mountain” ahead by asking how to rebuild her network and hit the ground running. She joined The Advocates' Society early, calling it “a blessing to me to get to know pretty much all the litigators in the city very quickly.”
Rodrigue didn’t stop at networking. She looked for gaps in the market, realizing the Ontario Bar Association lacked a class action section. “It took me a very long time to convince the powers that be to create such a section, but I didn’t give up, and we created the section,” she says. This move connected her with practitioners, academics, and judges, and helped her navigate a new market.
She says her approach to career building is methodical. Rodrigue urges lawyers to identify niches – she points to AI and privacy law as fields that were once overlooked but now offer opportunity. “Take the time to sit down, write down what you want professionally and personally, and then brainstorm as to where the niches are and then draw up a plan and identify the champions that are going to help you get there,” she says.
Rodrigue says her personal history – her experience as an adoptee – shapes her approach to advocacy and client relationships. “A lot of adoptees would share that they have deep insecurity. It’s sort of ingrained in us, insecurity personally, fear of rejection, but that transposes into your professional life,” she says. For Rodrigue, planning and preparation are tools to counteract that insecurity. “By thorough preparation, by not leaving any stone unturned, by trying to anticipate the other side’s move, by really, really preparing, I can get over that deep sense of insecurity or fear of the unknown,” she says.
Imposter syndrome is a recurring theme in her book. Rodrigue is candid: “Many successful professionals feel imposter syndrome, and this is not a gender thing,” she says. “I still have it. Every word, even walking in at [the] Supreme Court of Canada [for] the first time I had to argue … I felt like an imposter.” Her advice is to recognize imposter syndrome for what it is and not confuse it with a lack of confidence. “You've got to accept it. It’s not going to [completely] go away,” she says.
For Rodrigue, champions are critical. She emphasizes that the best champions in her career were not always women, and that young lawyers should look beyond their own demographic for support. “Don’t focus on believing that the only people who are going to champion you are the people [with whom] you identify, whether it’s ethnically or gender. It’s not necessarily the case,” she says. “Often, [it's] much more powerful to have a champion in a completely different group than yours who promotes you.”
Balance is not a luxury for Rodrigue, but a necessity. “You need to find what keeps you grounded,” she says. For her, horses provided that grounding, a discovery made almost by accident when she took her daughter for pony lessons. “I realized that petting the horse, just brushing the horse, was calming me down. It had a very therapeutic effect,” she says. She made time for it, even if it meant carving out time on weekends or after a tough day. “If I [walked] in the barn just to smell the horse, my stress level would drop by 50 percent,” she says. Now, her “happy place” is among olive trees in Tuscany, but the principle remains: “Everyone, every professional should have a happy place,” she says.
Rodrigue’s drive to share these lessons led her to write her book. She says she wanted to pass on what she learned about resilience, ambition, and the importance of owning your path, offering practical exercises and insights for anyone determined to build a career – and a life – on their own terms.
This article is based on an episode of CL Talk, which can also be found here:
The episode can also be found on our CL Talk podcast homepage, which includes links to follow CL Talk on all the major podcast providers.
