Monique Roberts

About Monique Roberts

Monique Roberts is a project management lawyer in Gowling WLG's Toronto office. When a new file opens, Roberts sets out a realistic plan for it, along with an estimate and a budget, and then keeps managing that plan until the matter's finished.

Roberts was called to the Ontario bar in 2009 and began in corporate and commercial work for privately held businesses, covering mergers and acquisitions, reorganizations, and arrangements between shareholders and partners. Early on, the traditional billable hour struck Roberts as a model that "encourages inefficiency." After working closely with the Toronto office's managing partner, Roberts was asked to help develop Gowlings Practical, the firm's legal project management program, and by 2016 was moving to that work full-time: building templates, running internal training and mentoring lawyers.

That same year, Roberts and two colleagues were training the firm's lawyers on Cael, a cloud-based tool for planning matters, and often guided others through putting a plan together. Roberts was also slated to present on legal project management in the Canadian Bar Association's 2016 Skilled Lawyer Series. For Roberts, the point of a plan is that the client and the legal team share the timelines and know who's handling the file from day one, so the conversation with the client carries on as the work moves forward.

Law is a second career. Before it, Roberts managed accounting in the magazine publishing industry and taught scuba diving in the Philippines, Egypt and Canada.