Practice & Core Values

I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer. And I wanted to be an international lawyer. Because I love meeting and working with people from different cultures.

So, in 1993, I moved from my native Canada (Quebec), where I had qualified and practiced as a lawyer, to do an LLM in Belgium in European and International law. After completing my LLM, I did an internship at the EU Commission, followed by an internship at the Canadian Mission to the EU.

I then joined the Canadian Embassy in Brussels and worked in that very interesting job until I was offered a position as a business consultant. I decided to accept the challenge so that I could get a feel of the corporate world. And I don’t regret it for a minute!

But after a few years, I could no longer ignore the pull of the legal world, my true calling. So I went back in 2003. I also went back to law school and got my Belgian law degree in 2005 – while working in a law firm and raising two small children. It was quite a challenge but it was really worth it because, although my work is very international, it also requires in-depth understanding of local law.

For nearly 15 years, I worked in law firms in Brussels as a lawyer specialized in corporate law, M&A, corporate governance and the GDPR, including almost 6 years in a BIG4 international law firm. I loved the international part of the work that I was doing but I grew increasingly frustrated by the traditional model for providing legal services: unnecessarily large number of lawyers at client meetings, time billed for every second of a client call, sky-high hourly rates and constant pressure to meet billing targets instead of concentrating on the clients’ needs.

So I left and did two things: I started my own law firm (which I had already been using as my management company since 2008) and I founded another company called “European Data Protection Office (EDPO)”.  Both projects were initiated by the same desire: to provide personalized, pragmatic and client-centric services to people who work in companies all over the world.

Now, I combine my work as a lawyer with mandates as a non-executive board member and member of various committees (audit, risk, legal, compliance, remuneration and corporate governance) in listed and non-listed companies in Brussels, London, Paris, Mumbai, Singapore, USA and Amsterdam.