MK Disability Lawyers LLP is the proud recipient of the Markham Board of Trade Business Excellence Award for best Women-Led Business for 2020. We would like to express our immense gratitude to the Markham Board of Trade, the selection committee, and award sponsor Scotiabank for this award and honour. We would like to thank your staff for their dedication and investment, our clients for putting their trust in us and the Markham community for always supporting us.
MK Disability Lawyers, a law firm owned and run by three female lawyers, Courtney Mulqueen, Rupa Karyampudi, and Leanne Goldstein, was created as a response to the traditional and often negative expectations that people have of lawyers and of law firms in general. As women, we felt it was critical to create a law firm/business that would be perceived as a place to seek support. We want our clients and the general public to experience lawyers and litigation in a more positive way as we believe that experience enhances positive outcomes.
Many of our clients are individuals that have been traumatized by adverse events in their lives; many have trust issues. The litigation process can be harsh and our goal in creating the company is to help our clients navigate that process while ensuring that their dignity, autonomy and mental health is preserved. As women from diverse backgrounds, we understand the systemic barriers that are faced by many of the individuals we represent and we want to help them voice their experiences and frustrations.
Inclusivity and diversity are critically important to us. We are mindful that our clients are marginalized due to their disabilities, but they may face additional oppression as a result of intersecting identities due to gender identity, racial identity, ethnic identity, and sexual orientation. We believe in being an ally when we observe discrimination in all its manifestations including overt, implicit, or systemic. We are mindful of our privilege as lawyers and we seek to use our privilege to actively advocate for those who are marginalized and oppressed in our society. Our goal is to give a voice to the voiceless.
As a women-led firm, our ability to leverage Emotional Intelligence is something that provides us with a competitive edge. We believe strongly that injecting humanity into lawyer-client interactions does not detract from professionalism and that vigorous advocacy and empathy can co-exist. As a women-led firm, we have a collaborative approach to problem-solving which helps us outperform others as we are seen as a cohesive force and a united front.
It is easy to deviate from your core values for the sake of business, however, staying true to ourselves and to our purpose in creating our firm has been what has guided our success. In fact, it has been in empowering one another as women and our employees that our firm has achieved success.
Our hope is that our firm will become synonymous with a different way of practicing law, one that embraces the concept that strong advocacy and empathy can co-exist. Our hope is to incrementally erode the negative perception that many people have of lawyers as transactional and the perception that the process of litigation is always a negative experience. Helping clients effectively navigate the emotional journey of litigation to reach a point of acceptance and closure is for us a critical part of access to justice.
We believe that our law firm will continue to grow through our efforts in connecting with others who share our core values; through our commitment to community education, and through the quality legal services we provide to our clients. Our goal is to be known as one of the most experienced LTD law firms in Canada and recognized nationally as a team of women lawyers who are not only fierce advocates but also caring and empathetic human beings.
