THE QUICK BIO
Paul Quinlan, 49, says his career has “been informed by things I didn’t plan.” The St. Catharines, Ontario, native intended to be a research scientist after growing up with a father who was a federal district court judge in Canada. Quinlan would graduate from the University of Toronto with a bachelor’s degree in science in 1985 and a master’s in biophysics in 1987 with a thesis on cataract research. But a career in research wasn’t quite as he had hoped. “I loved the benchwork, the experiments, but as you go further along, you actually spend most of your time writing research grants. All the things I liked to do I realized I’d do less of as my career progressed.” So after years of conversation about the law at the dinner table growing up, he opted to go back to those roots. He graduated from Queens University in Kingston, Canada, in 1990, worked as an associate from 1990 to 1991 at Blake, Cassels & Graydon, clerked for the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa from 1991 to 1992, and then moved to New York in 1992 to complete his Master of Laws at Columbia in 1994 with the intention to teach.
