There are very few women who represent activist investors. There are very few lawyers of either gender who represent both them and companies. This puts Patricia Olasker of Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg in a very small set. Although she’s a very busy woman operating in a high pressure and high stakes world, she kindly took the time to talk to me about her work.

Eccles: Hi, Patricia, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. Please tell me a little bit about your background.

Olasker: I was born in England to Royal Canadian Air Force parents. When I was three, we moved from bucolic Bath to wintery Winnipeg where I was raised for much of my life by a single mom. My mother was from a rural family with nine children and a father who drove long-haul trucks. She was brilliant, but higher education was not an option so she became a legal assistant to a well-known criminal lawyer in Winnipeg which was about as much as a girl from her background could aspire to. It was her experience in that job that inspired my interest in law.

Eccles: Wow, that’s quite an interesting story! So it was your Mom’s work that got you interested in law?

Olasker: Yes, she worked with one of Canada’s great criminal trial lawyers, Harry Walsh, who was a leading proponent of the abolition of capital punishment in Canada and was instrumental in bringing that about. My mother was passionate about her job and about issues of social justice and came home each night with tales of the day’s work. She would have loved to have been a lawyer. Her enthusiasm for the work was contagious and at a very young age I determined that I wanted her boss’s job. I guess I am living out her dream. In preparing me for a life better than her own, she was obsessed with education and achievement and resolutely taught me no domestic skills, a deficiency from which I still suffer today.

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