Creating your own circumstances the best way to go Southam Newspaper : Vancouver Law is a business just like any other Louis Kiersteaad was five months old when his name appeared in Hansard, the official record of parliamentary proceedings. He was named as the person in attendance on his mother’s lap while she gave a presentation to a parliamentary immigration committee assessing gender-based refugee claims. That was in May 1995. “Both my sons came to work with me for the first three-and-a-half months of life.” Vancouver immigration lawyer Catherine Sas said in an interview. Louis’ younger brother William also made a legal precedent when he was two weeks old and his mother breast-fed him in a hearing room at the end of a long day in court, enabling a case she was involved in to reach a conclusion, rather than be adjourned to another day. The point Sas wants to make is that perceived gender barriers can be overcome­and women have to create their own circumstances to succeed. Sas delivered her message recently in Vancouver at the Inter-Pacific Bar Association conference. The IPBA is an international association of business and commercial lawyers with more than 1,800 members from 65 regions in the Pacific Rim. “The secret to being successful in business­particularly as a women in the legal profession­is by creating your own circumstances,” she said. “I have definitely created my own circumstances and it’s worked for me. I have trusted my instincts and I have followed my hunches. I have taken risks if I thought it would be right for me, and it’s been a very good formula.” One of her heroes is the playwright George Bernard Shaw. In Sas’ office, she has a framed quotation from Act 2 of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1883): “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.” Sas, 37, one of Vancouver’s leading immigration lawyers, says her message to her fellow lawyers applies to other business people too. “Marketing is about creating your own circumstances. Whatever you want your circumstances to be, you have to firstly determine them and then pursue and create them.” She said lawyers, being professionals, often don’t think of themselves as business people, but that’s what they are. “We are business people first. We can be the best legal minds on the planet, but if we don’t have any clients we can’t use our talents.” The UBC law graduate and past chairperson of the Canadian Bar Association’s immigration law section said she ha tried to persuade the law deans as both the UBC and the University of Victoria to include a course on business practice in the law degree curriculum. “They say business practices are best left to the law society. I disagree. I think that’s very naïve. A lot of lawyers think work is going to fall out of heaven into their laps. They are not taught how to find clients, what’s their market, what’s their niche going to be, their hook. How can they bring people in to create their own work? How do we teach lawyers to think about what they do to generate business?” Sas found several ways to help herself. After first working out of her home in East Vancouver, she moved into a little house on Helmcken Street, just across the rod from the federal immigration office. “People would be lined up outside at 3 a.m. and they’d come out later in the day and they still did not have the answer to their questions, so they’d make a beeline to my office.” She has her own Web site and a brochure featuring pictures of her and her children, now aged 51/2 and almost three. They have traveled with her all over the world. “My children are a unique part of my business. People can accuse me of using my children in my marketing strategy because they are on my brochure. But my business is about attracting immigrants and immigration is generally a family process. My image as a woman and a mother helps build a level of trust and security with my clients. When people come into my office, the first thing they see is photos of my children. They ask about them. I am not going to apologize for that. That’s my reality. “A lot of what we do in life is attitudinal. ‘I can’t do this because I have children, or because it will offend other people in the office, or because the men in my firm won’t like it.’ I don’t see myself as a woman in business. I think of myself as a business person. To be a successful business person, you have to be assertive and confident in who you are and what you are. I am very vocal and forthright. But you can be confident in a different style. You can be quiet and confident.” Sas said her skill and knowledge enables her to charge above-average fees-­$275 an hour­and $150 for an initial 30-minute consultation. “I have to charge for consultations because I wouldn’t get any work done otherwise. A lawyer is a person who assumes responsibility for other people’s problems. People get rid of their problems by putting them on our shoulders. It becomes our stress. “Once they start paying they are very demanding and that makes us demanding.” “I tell my clients, ‘You have to have a strong constitution­mostly to deal with me.’” Honduran couple wins long fight to stay with their children in Canada Creating your own circumstances the best way to go