Melanie Polowin

About Melanie Polowin

Melanie Polowin is a partner in Gowling WLG's Ottawa office, and the clients are employers. Private sector businesses of every size and stage, Canadian and international, turn to Polowin for help at each point in a working relationship, from bringing someone on board to letting them go, and from a company's launch to its wind-down. The aim is advice that's practical and fits how the business really operates.

Disputes and change are part of the mix too: Polowin plans and carries out workplace change, and manages and resolves employment disputes. Employers have also heard the partner speak at conferences and client seminars on harassment, compensation planning, and disability and accommodation. At a 2015 firm seminar, Polowin explained how the legal standard for accommodating disability had shifted and gave employers a memorable acrostic, STOP, DROP and ROL, so they wouldn't react rashly when an employee raises a disability.

Polowin earned an LLB at the University of Ottawa and was called to the Ontario bar in 1993. Deal work runs alongside the day-to-day advice: buyers, sellers and investors bring in the partner to handle the employment side of financings, mergers, acquisitions and IPOs, particularly when a company is entering the Canadian market. In 2022, for example, Polowin covered employment on the Gowling WLG team that advised PeopleInsight, an Ottawa workplace analytics company, when HireRoad acquired it.