Natalia Thawe brought a claim for wrongful dismissal and discrimination against the firm last week
A Black former senior associate at Gowling WLG has sued the firm for discrimination and wrongful dismissal, alleging the firm’s Toronto office held her to higher standards than white colleagues, withheld work while raising concerns about her billable hours, and forced her out of the firm.
The lawyer, Natalia Thawe, also claimed that an investigation Gowling launched in response to her discrimination concerns was “fundamentally flawed and inadequate from the outset.”
Filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice last week, Thawe’s complaint said that out of more than 480 partners across Gowling’s Canadian offices, only four were Black around the time she was terminated in July 2024.
Kathryn Marshall, who represents Thawe, told Canadian Lawyer it is unusual for lawyers to pursue legal action against their employer when that employer is a large business firm.
Gowling frequently ranks among the top 10 largest firms in Canada, with around 800 lawyers.
“This case is definitely lifting a veil off of what goes on behind the scenes in a large law firm,” Marshall says. “As you can see from this lawsuit, it’s very political, it’s not merit-based, and there’s a lot of room for discretion that can be fueled by unconscious bias and systemic racism.”
In a statement, Gowling firm managing partner Lorraine Mastersmith said the firm is taking Thawe’s concerns “extremely seriously” but denied her allegations.
“Rubin Thomlinson LLP, a well-respected law firm specializing in workplace matters, was engaged to conduct a rigorous independent investigation over a period of several months,” Mastersmith said. “We are confident in the integrity of that process and are satisfied with its conclusions, which will feature heavily in the statement of defence we will file in due course.”
Thawe’s history with Gowling dates to 2015, when she joined the firm as a summer student. After graduating from York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, she returned to the firm for articling and was later hired back as an associate on the firm’s intellectual property team.
Thawe worked primarily out of Gowling’s Ottawa office, but asked about the possibility of transferring to the Toronto office in 2020 due to health and family circumstances. However, Thawe said she decided against the transfer after meeting with the head of Toronto’s IP department, who she claimed approached her with “clear, inexplicable hostility.”
In 2022, the lead partner of Thawe’s Ottawa IP team, Christopher Van Barr, approached her with two potential opportunities: a secondment to a prominent pharmaceutical client or a transfer to Toronto’s IP department. Another Ottawa colleague would join Thawe in Toronto. Thawe says she expressed enthusiasm about the secondment and reservations about the move to Toronto, based on her 2020 meeting.
According to Thawe, Van Barr assured her that the Toronto team was keen on her joining their office. She transferred to Toronto in August 2022 after speaking with senior partners who told her she would continue to work primarily with the Ottawa IP team.
In 2023, Thawe relocated to London to care for her family, based on her understanding that legal professionals at Gowling were allowed to work remotely. She alleged that her billable hours temporarily decreased, along with the hours of other associates on the Ottawa and Toronto IP teams, due to a reduction in hours. In 2024, however, her Ottawa team took on a pharmaceutical litigation matter that she believed would push her billable hours to exceed her firm’s target that year.
That spring, Van Barr told Thawe that the head of Toronto’s IP department expressed concerns about her billable hours and her lack of integration into the Toronto office. Van Barr proposed that Thawe join him and a Toronto partner on a litigation matter, and she subsequently assisted them to better integrate into the Toronto team. She continued working on her Ottawa matters and told both the Toronto partner and the director of Gowling’s associate and law clerk programs that she sometimes faced challenges commuting to Toronto from London.
Thawe alleged that her in-office attendance was consistent with that of other lawyers, many of whom rarely worked in the office.
In May, management for Gowling’s Toronto office gave Thawe an ultimatum: she could return to the Ottawa office, or they would take action against her, Thawe alleged. She said management told her the ultimatum was based on her lack of interest in working at the office. During the same call, Van Barr and Thawe learned that several Toronto IP partners had withheld work from her, the lawsuit said. Van Barr had secured work for Thawe with other IP partners in the Toronto office, but those partners never contacted her.
The next month, the firm offered Thawe a new employment agreement contingent on her returning to the Ottawa office. The agreement would freeze her salary indefinitely. After Thawe raised concerns about the agreement, she declined the offer and was fired shortly after. Days later, she wrote an email to Gowling’s senior management, board of directors, and certain partners outlining the discriminatory treatment she had experienced at the firm, as a follow-up to several concerns she had raised about explicit bias before her termination. Thawe also expressed concerns about barriers faced by other Black lawyers at the firm.
The firm hired Rubin Thomlinson LLP to investigate Thawe’s claims. However, Thawe alleges the investigators “employed fragmented, incident-by-incident methodology that analyzed events in isolation and failed to consider their cumulative effect.” She added that their approach reduced her experiences to discrete events, minimized the systemic nature of the concerns she raised, and insulated Gowling from accountability.
Thawe claimed the white colleague with whom she transferred to the Toronto office in 2022 faced no consequences for working primarily on Ottawa matters.
She also alleged that Gowling has a track record of admitting white associates into the firm’s partnership even when they lacked a continuous successful billing record, arguing that while she “was met with an ultimatum and termination following a temporary decrease in billable hours, her colleagues were immediately offered partnership after a significant career break or upon newly joining the firm.”
Originally published by Canadian Lawyer Magazine: https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/practice-areas/labour-and-employment/black-ip-lawyer-sues-gowling-claims-toronto-office-held-her-to-higher-standards-than-white-colleagues/394035