The Canadian Bar Association named its first president of color earlier this month.

Vivene Salmon, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, is also only the second in-house attorney ever elected to lead the more than 36,000-member voluntary organization in its 123-year history.

Salmon is vice president and country compliance manager for global banking and markets compliance at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Canada, where she reports to the chief compliance officer and general counsel. She also is the designated privacy officer for Bank of America National Association, Canada Branch.

As bar president, Salmon has pledged to put intergenerational relations among lawyers, diversity and inclusion, student debt and lawyer health at the top of her agenda.The Canadian Bar Association is a bilingual organization serving both French- and English-speaking members.

Salmon is a 2009 graduate of the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law in Ottawa, Ontario, which she attended after working for several years in crisis communications for the Ontario government. She grew up in Waterloo, Ontario, with her parents and two brothers and completed her undergraduate studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo.

Corporate Counsel interviewed her Monday by telephone at her home in Toronto. Her responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Corporate Counsel: What are your main goals for your term of office?

Vivene Salmon: For me, my No. 1 focus is on intergenerational dialogue, and a conversation between younger and more senior members. I was called to the bar in 2010 during the financial crisis. The profession has changed so drastically and it is important that we have a dialogue about issues. Many senior lawyers, what they paid for tuition is not anywhere on the scale what lawyers pay now, and why are we having challenges with young people finding work?

The other is diversity. Obviously I myself am a woman of color. Unless those are the shoes you walk in, it is hard to understand the challenges lawyers of color face.

And the third is a focus on healthy lawyers, given the high rates of suicide, depression and burnout. Being a lawyer is a calling, not a job. There are a million things you can do but you chose to be a lawyer, so it is important that health be top of mind for legal employers. My mom has battled early Alzheimer's disease and I have had a bird's-eye view that if you want to [be a family] but you want to be a good lawyer, too. In the past, there has been a feeling that lawyers aren't people and are martyrs to the profession. It shouldn't be that way.

CC: They say you are only the second in-house attorney to be president of the CBA founded in 1896. Why do you think that is?

[According to the CBA, the first was Fred Headon, who was president from 2013-2014. He is assistant general counsel of labor and employment law at Montreal-based Air Canada. Salmon is its seventh female president.]

VS: I think it is probably twofold. I think that people in a big firm, a community of lawyers, would understand why [a candidate] would put so much interest and effort behind it. Working in-house you are working in a family, but not a family of only lawyers. You have to get a buy-in from your CEO, and general counsel, etc. The biggest hurdle is getting that support. And the same thing happens with people in smaller practices, if you are a solo practitioner it is harder to put in the effort. The challenges on your time are great.

CC: Are there any special initiatives for in-house counsel this year at the CBA?

VS: The Canadian Bar Association and the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association will be participating in the In-House Counsel Worldwide International Conference in New Zealand—sending Canadian in-house lawyers as both speakers and participants.

CC: How difficult was it to break into corporate in-house law in Canada as a woman who is a person of color? Did you face obstacles from race or gender to become an in-house attorney? 

[Note: In the province of Ontario, 2017 statistics indicated that about 21% of attorneys self-identified as a member of a racial minority group and 1.6% indigenous, compared with about 78% of attorneys who said they were white, against a total population that was 68% white and 29% racial minorities and 3% indigenous.]

VS: I don't know anyone who is a person of color who hasn't had challenges. In every job I have experienced some level of racism but even though things might be difficult, you can't be afraid to put your oar in the water. As one of my uncles always said, the path is still to be cleared and the journey is not over but there are many challenges for racialized people [a Canadian term for racially diverse] and women and people with disabilities but there is support, too.

Diversity, inclusion and belonging is what we like to say. Those are three different things. We don't talk about a pipeline issue as much in Canada, but in a way it is one: The affordability of legal education is becoming increasingly problematic with how high the admission fees can be … at the University of Toronto it is about $35,000 [Canadian dollars]. It is a lot to ask someone to take on $100,000 to $150,000 debt, and in Canada the legal market is not what it has been. A lot of things have changed since the financial crisis.

It is incumbent that the justice system reflects society, and that we respect the rule of law. It is a challenge when the system is not reflecting the people that make up the system. … Women are 50-51% of graduates but there is high attrition at the law firms and we are not quite where we need to be with women and racialized people in the legal profession. Some of the more lucrative areas of law are even more white, and some areas are dominated by women like family law. Achieving true equality and getting talent recognized is critical if we want a just society, and that is what we are fighting for. It is a tragedy when talented people don't get a chance to be great.

The Canadian Bar has been trying to have diversity in all its forms in speaker panels and to have diverse speakers.

CC: Why is the intergenerational relations issue so important? Are there special problems that you see?

[Note: Salmon describes herself as on the cusp of Generation X and millennial.]

VS: It's a value on time. They [the younger cohort of lawyers] have seen their parents be professional and burning out and a lot of things taking second place in their lives. They want to be great lawyers but they want to be well-rounded people. If they want to take two weeks off to volunteer or build a school, they want that time off. The senior people bragging that they get by on three hours of sleep, or never take a vacation; it is those kinds of frictions that can happen.

And the question of mentorship. For a lot of young people there is not the sense of loyalty and they have multiple mentors. Mentorship and sponsorship relationships have shifted a lot. There is a lot of friction, to some degree, in values between the generations in how we practice law, and what it takes to be a good lawyer. Like, can we use technology better? And [there is] our articling crisis. [Note: Articling is a mandatory 10-month apprenticeship after law school and before the bar exam for which there is no exact equivalent in the U.S. legal system. Some provinces have an acute shortage of these positions for entry-level lawyers.]

CC: Are there ways that CBA and American Bar Association in the U.S. could work more closely together?

VS: I have spoken to the new ABA president Judy Perry Martinez, and because of our conversations I am excited about working with her and I have had great conversations with her and hopefully we can do more together. A couple of our lawyers in Canada went to the ABA annual meeting in San Francisco [in August], and in 2021 they [the ABA] will hold it here in Toronto. We think Toronto is a great city and we think it is great they are going to come here.

Our young lawyers were attending the ABA Young Lawyers Division meeting in Washington, D.C., and they came back with some great ideas. There will be a national young lawyer's conference in June 2020 in Toronto. They will extend an invitation to ABA colleagues also. It would be great for some of our American friends to attend as well.