A Black lawyer who worked at prominent Bay Street firm Gowling WLG has launched a $1-million lawsuit against the firm for wrongful dismissal, alleging she was denied advancement, had her compensation frozen and was ultimately fired because of her race.
Natalia Thawe, 37, was employed as an intellectual property lawyer at Gowlings’ Toronto and Ottawa offices on a full-time basis beginning in 2018, after completing her articling term with the firm. At the time she was dismissed– in July, 2024 – Ms. Thawe was a senior associate on Gowlings’ IP team and worked primarily in Toronto.
The lawsuit was filed on April 24 in a Toronto court. None of the allegations have been proven.
While wrongful dismissal claims are some of the most common types of employment litigation, it is not often that they are made public. These disputes are usually resolved before formal court proceedings, with both employers and employees preferring to settle matters behind closed doors to avoid public scrutiny.
In a statement to The Globe and Mail, Ms. Thawe said she initiated a lawsuit against Gowlings because staying silent did not serve her, the Black community or the legal profession. “My silence would only protect the status quo and be just another hindrance to meaningful progress toward equity in the profession,” she said.
In an e-mail, Gowlings’ Ottawa managing partner Lorraine Mastersmith said the firm takes the concerns raised by Ms. Thawe very seriously and engaged a third-party law firm, Rubin Thomlinson LLP, in late 2024 to conduct a “rigorous independent investigation” of Ms. Thawe’s complaints when they surfaced. Gowlings “vehemently” denies the allegations in the suit, Ms. Mastersmith added. The conclusions of the report will feature prominently in the firm’s defence, which will be filed in due course, she said.
Ms. Thawe alleges her difficulties at the firm began when she relocated to the Toronto office from Ottawa, in August, 2022. She alleges she received limited billable work from the Toronto office, and was met with an “inexplicable hostility” from the head of the IP department, Kevin Sartorio, who had asked to see her résumé before she joined the Toronto office. At the time, she had already worked for years in Gowlings’ Ottawa office.
In 2023, Ms. Thawe said her billable hours decreased because of a lack of assignments, but in 2024, she took on more work that came from her Ottawa managers and was on track to exceed her billable hour target. She believed her career at Gowlings was “back on track.”
But in April, 2024, she received an e-mail from the managing partner in Toronto, Daniel Cole, inquiring about her workload. Mr. Cole, according to the suit, was concerned about Ms. Thawe’s billable hours, and “lack of integration” in the Toronto office, issues that she claimed were never raised with her by any of her managers even in performance reviews.
Ms. Thawe subsequently reached out to her manager in Ottawa to clarify the situation. In the course of conversation, she alleges that she discovered from her manager that certain Toronto IP partners actively withheld work from her by not looping her in on relevant files even when they were told by her Ottawa manager to involve her. “This deliberate withholding of work materially undermined Ms. Thawe’s ability to meaningfully integrate into the Toronto office and meet her billable hour target,” the lawsuit states.
Mr. Cole, the head of the Toronto office, was also concerned about Ms. Thawe’s in-office attendance, according to the suit.
Ms. Thawe, who lived in London, Ont., at the time, had received permission from the firm’s director of the associate and law clerk program that she would be allowed to work fewer in-office days owing to a family health issue. But she alleges that the fact that she got permission for it angered the Toronto management team, with Mr. Cole telling other senior partners that Ms. Thawe was “not interested in coming into the office much.”
The lawsuit claims that Ms. Thawe was being “singled out” by Toronto management, as in-person attendance was “rare and sporadic” among other lawyers in the firm. Mr. Cole himself, was rarely present in the Toronto office, the suit states.
In June, 2024, Ms. Thawe was presented with a new employment agreement that asked her to relocate to Ottawa. Her salary would have been frozen indefinitely as a result of the move, she said. A Gowlings’ human resources manager told Ms. Thawe that her salary of $215,000 was already “higher than the band for Ottawa people.”
Ms. Thawe rejected the Ottawa offer, calling the new contract one that had “adverse and punitive terms.”
Weeks later, in July, 2024, she was informed by Mr. Cole that her employment would be terminated and that it was a “business decision,” according to the suit. When she pressed Mr. Cole on the reasons behind the firing, he stated that her employment was not sustainable in the Toronto office because she worked on Ottawa-based files when she was expected to work predominantly on Toronto matters.
Ms. Thawe maintains in the lawsuit that Mr. Cole’s assertions are untrue and unreasonable, and that he failed to consider her positive performance reviews and many attempts to integrate into the Toronto office.
“The events leading to Ms. Thawe’s termination were a culmination of a sustained pattern of antagonistic behaviours, rooted in a systemic racial bias and a failure of accountability and leadership within Gowling,” the suit states.
Ms. Thawe’s suit accuses the firm of violating the Ontario Human Rights Code, which defines racial discrimination as “any action, whether intentional or not, but based on a person’s race, which has the effect of imposing burdens on an individual or group.”
Toronto law firms were some of the earliest and most public signatories of diversity and equity commitments following the corporate racial reckoning that took place in the summer of 2020.
Gowlings, alongside a host of other elite Bay Street law firms including Goodmans LLP, McCarthy Tétrault, and Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, signed the BlackNorth Initiative in August, 2020, committing to ensure that “no barriers exist” to prevent Black employees from advancing within the company.
Pako Tshiamala, the founder and CEO of Blink Equity, a consulting company that specifically tracks diversity data at Canadian law firms, said the amount of work an associate gets is based not just on the quality of their performance, but on who is willing to work with you. “Often, the latter is based on unconscious and cultural bias,” he said.
“For younger Black and racialized lawyers, it’s much harder to build the social capital within or outside their law firm that aids career advancement.”
Ms. Thawe is being represented by Kathryn Marshall of Marshall Law, a Toronto labour and employment firm that frequently handles high-profile suits against large employers. Most recently, Ms. Marshall represented former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation anchor Travis Dhanraj in a human-rights complaint against the public broadcaster for racial discrimination.
Originally published by the Globe and Mail: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-former-gowlings-lawyer-launches-wrongful-dismissal-lawsuit-alleging/