Bettina Burgess

About Bettina Burgess

Bettina Burgess helps employers handle workplace law and the privacy questions that come with managing a workforce, drawing on more than 20 years in the field. As a partner at Gowling WLG, Bettina works with local companies and global ones alike, and the advice is meant to be practical and business-minded. What clients are after is a productive solution, not a legal answer for its own sake, and that's where Bettina puts the focus.

Bettina was called to the Ontario bar in 2001 after law school at Windsor. By 2015 Bettina was practising employment and privacy law from the Kitchener Waterloo office of Gowlings. Today the practice runs out of both the Waterloo Region and Toronto offices, with a direct line in each.

Bettina likes clients to start from a solid foundation, so the work often means looking over how a client's workforce is set up and putting the core paperwork in place, from the agreements people sign to the policies and training behind them. To make that advice fit, Bettina gets to know each client's business, how much risk it's comfortable with and what it wants to achieve. And when a claim does land, Bettina has defended human rights applications and wrongful dismissal suits, carrying them from commencement through to resolution.

Bettina is an active writer and speaker on workplace issues. In an April 2022 Law Times piece on Ontario's new right to disconnect rules, Bettina predicted a slow cultural shift that may take employers many years to get right. Talks have included HRPA's national conference in 2011 and 2012, and a 2018 session in Kitchener for HRPA's Grand Valley chapter on the new work environment, covering remote work, monitoring productivity and open-concept offices.