15 Questions in 15 Minutes with Kathy O'Brien

  • March 11, 2020
  • Nida Sohani

  1. LET'S START WITH THE BASICS: WHAT’S YOUR NAME AND WHERE DID YOU GROW UP?

My name is Kathy O’Brien and I grew up sort of moving around Ontario – I lived in London, Scarborough, Sudbury, and my mom is still in Burlington.

  1. WHERE DID YOU GO TO LAW SCHOOL AND WHAT WAS YOUR SELECTION PROCESS?

I went to the University of Toronto. I got into the University of Western Ontario and Osgoode, but I had done my first year of undergrad at York and didn’t want to go back to the York campus, which I thought was in the middle of nowhere.  In contrast, U of T was right in downtown Toronto so that’s where I went, and I have been here since.

  1. TELL ME ABOUT A MEMORABLE OR ‘A-HA’ MOMENT FROM LAW SCHOOL, WHEN YOU LEARNED A PRACTICAL POINT ABOUT THE LAW THAT HELPED YOU IN YOUR CAREER, OR, YOU FIRST REALIZED YOU WERE REALLY ON TRACK TO BECOMING A LAWYER.

That did not happen in law school. I was not a huge fan of law school; I hated the case study method (they still have it and it's still just as terrible!).

My “aha” moment was when I was articling and I did a lot of aircraft finance so I was doing a lot of PPSA filing, and all of a sudden, I understood what it meant to perfect a security interest – it meant filing it with the government! Law school made it sound so unnecessarily complicated, so I just feel like it doesn’t give you the proper skills to do the work. You read 5 cases to distil it down to one principle, I would rather you just tell me the principle and I can go from there.