Finding my niche during the pandemic
COVID-19 was a challenge that presented an opportunity for me to launch a new law firm.
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The headlines on April 15, 2020 were worrisome. I remember because it was the day my daughter was born. The timing of her birth and the peak of Alberta’s first Covid-19 wave was accidental, but at the time, it felt ominous. I wasn’t allowed into the delivery room out of an abundance of caution, and was relegated to a random wing of the hospital to simply “wait.” I had with me a copy of Ryan Holiday’s “The Obstacle is the Way,” and did my best to lose myself in it.
Within those pages, I came across the Latin term “Vires Acquirit Eundo” (We gather strength as we go). I adopted those words, then and there, as the game plan for the remainder of the pandemic. I decided I wasn’t going to hold my breath. I would oxygenate. We welcomed a healthy baby girl, returned home and did our best to keep life for our three kids “normal.”
A few weeks later, my firm advised me of pending changes to operations — changes within their prerogative, but which I could not abide. And with that, the realization that I would need to start a new practice, my own practice, from scratch.
Vires Acquirit Eundo.
I began to reflect on the people that I had met over my seven years in practice. I called on them, brought them into the inner circle, leaned on them. The seed of a new, pandemic-born firm had been planted in my mind, and with it, a shift in focus while the coronavirus raged on all around me.
It is now nearly a year and a half later, and it feels like waking up from a dream. My daughter, shielded from the world for so long, is now meeting more and more smiling faces. Elevator Law officially opened on March 1, 2021 and continues to gain momentum. I look back on the past 15 months, and realize that the obstacle really did become the way. What I first took as impediments — a new baby, a global pandemic, a firm restructuring — forced me to find a path forward that I otherwise may have never sought out. That I am here today, deeply proud of my new practice, not in spite of the pandemic, but precisely because of it. It is my sincere hope that countless others have found similar lights in the darkness to shine new ways forward.
Vires Acquirit Eundo.
