Master’s grad and U of T Associate University Counsel, Julie McAlpine-Jeffries (LLM 2008)

Julie McAlpine-Jeffries (LLM 2008), associate general counsel for the University of Toronto, is an “accidental” lawyer who became so fascinated by the law that she pursued her LLM at Faculty of Law simply to enjoy learning more about a variety of aspects of the law.

After earning her BA in communications, McAlpine-Jeffries worked for a business publication to get a feel for the industry in which she planned to pursue a career. To keep herself entertained during the subway commute, this fan of quizzes purchased a Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) question book and discovered that she enjoyed answering the questions.

McAlpine-Jeffries soon realized that working in business journalism wasn’t the career she wanted after all, so she registered to take the LSAT and went on to law school. After graduation, she pursued a career in labour and employment law, a people-focused field of law that captured her interest. She enjoyed working at a downtown boutique firm, but having children was also a priority for her. After giving birth to her first child, McAlpine-Jeffries realized that the time required to become a partner at a law firm “wasn’t conducive to being the parent I wanted to be,” and she looked elsewhere.

While doing policy work for the Ontario Ministry of Labour, advising on issues related to labour and employment, she saw a University of Toronto advertisement for a labour and employment lawyer with a policy background. That was 20 years ago, and McAlpine-Jeffries hasn’t looked back.

The Faculty of Law entered the picture a few years later. McAlpine-Jeffries had been musing about doing a professional master’s degree and learning more about the law, so she applied to the LLM program and pursued the degree part time while working an 80 per cent workload.

“I wanted more in-depth learning and I loved the program and the courses,” Jeffries says. “I picked things in the field that I wanted to study and learned more about the broader ideas. In the end, it was really personal enrichment. It was a real privilege to be able to do this and U of T was happy to let me take courses that fit my work schedule, so it all came together.”

Intense courses taught by visiting professors for short stretches during the noon hour intrigued her, allowing her to explore subjects like international labour and social justice law.

“I loved the breadth of ideas,” she says. “Because I wasn’t doing this for my career, I just took the courses that interested me.”

Initially, she toyed with the idea of continuing on to become an academic, but “writing a thesis was so stressful, I decided it wasn’t a good idea.” Instead, she enjoyed doing the research, which focused on the then-recent removal of the mandatory retirement age in Canada, an issue that dovetailed nicely with her employment and labour law work at U of T.

“It was relevant to work, but writing a thesis gave me an opportunity to think really hard about this issue in a way I wouldn’t have time to do otherwise."

Her LLM has enriched her life and her career, and McAlpine-Jeffries is delighted that the fates led her to law school and such a rewarding career.