The Renno & Vathilakis award in family law is a scholarship that we created and is given to the student with the highest grade in family law after their first year of studies.
My name is Michael Vathilakis. I am a graduate of the University of Ottawa. I completed the national program in 2000. I completed my studies in civil law in 1998 and today I am a partner at Renno & Vathilakis here in Montreal.
In 1995, when I started university, it was really the first time I had studied in French, but it was quite a challenge. There were lots of students from Montreal who went together. I have some really wonderful memories of my three years at university.
When I completed my studies at the University of Ottawa, I started my career at a big law firm here in Montreal, and after two or three years, they transferred me to their offices in Toronto. That’s where university really helped me in the beginning because I already had my civil law and common law degrees. So I was able to practise in both jurisdictions. After that, I went in-house, which means I was vice president of legal affairs for a multinational company. That really gave me a different perspective, which I think helped me a lot when I started my own firm with my partner in 2015.
One of the things that we do here at the firm, we do a fair amount of commercial litigation, class action work, and family law. And quite frankly, family law was an area of the law that maybe a lot of us or some of us here didn’t think we would get into initially. We wanted to give back to the university and give back to sort of the ground that gave us a start or that certainly gave me a start. Seeing as it’s a compulsory course in first year, we thought that it would be a good way to give back in terms of maybe a subject matter that has sort of helped us grow here as well. It hit an element of not only fond memories but something that became of real practical use for us and kind of helped us grow. We were even happier to hear that Madame Giroux was still at the Faculty. So that certainly lent credence for us in terms of giving back.
My real advice for anyone that’s starting out is truly find an area of the law or something that you like because if you’re practising in an area that you like and, by the way, try almost anything. You’re not going to know on day one whether you love criminal law, whether you love mergers and acquisitions. I’m always amazed when we’re interviewing someone in their first year and they say, “I want to do exclusively labour law.” And I think, wow, you’re about 10 years ahead of where I was, because it took me 10, 15 years to figure out what I like. And the reality is that by doing commercial litigation, class actions, and family law today, I’m constantly circling around areas that I like. So find something you like, and if you can find a mentor that you can trust or mentors that you can trust and really learn from.
