Garrett Hamel

About Garrett Hamel

Business owners and investors who are buying, selling, financing or starting a company can work with Garrett Hamel, a corporate and commercial partner at Gowling WLG in Ottawa. Garrett covers most of the corporate and commercial field, concentrating on private mergers and acquisitions, commercial contracts, corporate finance and new incorporations, and counts aviation, aerospace and defence among the areas of focus too.

That practice has put Garrett on a range of transactions. In 2019 Garrett and Karen Hennessey acted for one of the selling shareholders when Foodtastic bought Ottawa's Big Rig Brewery and Big Rig Restaurants. In 2021 Garrett was part of the Gowling WLG corporate team for the shareholders of D.L. Building Materials when a GMS Inc. subsidiary acquired the company, and later that year worked on the corporate and M&A side as EBlock picked up TradeHelper and its sister business, ESP Auctions.

Garrett joined the Ontario bar in 2016, a year after finishing a JD cum laude at the University of Ottawa, and became a partner at Gowling WLG on January 1, 2023. Garrett has also worked in administration for mining and construction companies.

Sport runs through Garrett's story. An honours commerce degree in sports administration from Laurentian University came with internships at a Toronto marketing agency and with the Tampa Bay Lightning's marketing and corporate services department, and Garrett led a social media consulting project for Kroenke Sports & Entertainment covering the Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche. At law school Garrett won the 2015 National Baseball Arbitration Competition at Tulane University, took part in the Hockey Arbitration Competition of Canada and served as co-president of the University of Ottawa's Music, Entertainment and Sport Society of Law. Hockey has honoured Garrett too: the Greater Metro Hockey League hands out the Garrett Hamel Award every year to the player showing the most heart for the game.