Sarah Qadeer, BCL’96, Chief Legal Officer at Deloitte Canada, shares how her multidisciplinary training prepared her for leading legal teams through major business transformations – a rare skill that earned her the 2024 General Counsel of the Year Award.
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For Sarah Qadeer, each workday is “dramatically different.” As Chief Legal Officer for Deloitte Canada and Chile, Sarah wears numerous hats - she is a leader, strategic partner, team member, change agent, and mentor. Her job requires she bring all her intellectual and emotional skills to the table, be it for examining business strategies or leading litigation. “If you like breadth, if you like challenges, and you don’t want to be bored, it’s a great role,” she says.
Deloitte brought on Qadeer as the professional services firm was preparing a big leap into innovation and complex technology consulting. She started in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. Qadeer had to start her professional relationships over the screen.
And still, Qadeer accomplished great transformations in very little time. Her team played a key role in helping to drive Deloitte’s acquisition of Innovapost, Canada Post’s IT services division. The transformation of the legal function and this milestone, unprecedented transaction, earned her such recognition that she received the .
Growing up in Toronto, where she lives now, Qadeer was strong at school in many subjects, and enjoyed them all, from literature to science. When it came time to pick a path, Qadeer decided on 91ÉçÇř for its stellar reputation and international, bilingual community. Not wanting to limit herself, she did a bachelor’s in microbiology and immunology, with a minor in literature and art history. “It was an unusual combination but it made me feel I could be my full self. It also spoke to the two sides of my brain,” she recalls.
After her degree, law school seemed broad enough to capture both her logical and creative interests, particularly 91ÉçÇř’s bilingual, bi-juridical education. Qadeer spent a summer researching access to justice for the late Professor Rod Macdonald, OC, FRSC, former dean of the Faculty. “The intellectual bent of the joint LLB and BCL program allowed me to explore broad societal interests and think about the intersection of public interest, law, and commerce.”
Though she first expected to go into public policy or human rights after graduation, Qadeer also considered big firms. Not having lawyers in her family to turn to, she asked her mentor Professor Macdonald for advice. When corporate law firm offers from Toronto and Montreal came in, he helped her choose one of the largest national law firms, McCarthy TĂ©trault, as being a suitable training ground.
Somewhat to Qadeer’s surprise, she discovered a love for Mergers and Acquisitions, and large, cross-border deals.
After 12 years in Quebec, Qadeer returned to Toronto to practice business and securities law at BMO, followed by 12 years at Home Depot where she moved her way up to General Counsel.
Then she was headhunted to help bring Deloitte into its tech-fuelled future strategy. Transformation on that scale requires “a really deep understanding of where the business wants to go,” says Qadeer.
As the legal department’s leader, Qadeer needed to develop a vision and a strategy, build up and align the team, and bring all the executives willingly on a “very deliberate, but sometimes disruptive journey.”
“The ability to communicate effectively and persuasively is incredibly important for a leader. As is getting followership for your ideas within your own team, and within the broader organization.”
Transformation is inherently creative and messy, Qadeer notes, and success isn’t certain. She asks colleagues to, “Bring your thinking that allows you to go beyond the four corners of your subject matter expertise.”
Legal professionals aren’t always used to a business mindset, Qadeer explains. Lawyers are traditionally presented with problems that they either solve or advise on. She asked her team to think outside the box about the work they do. Can it be done better, more efficiently, or not at all? How do you approach new technologies where there is no playbook and regulation, like AI?
“Being comfortable with ambiguity, a strong sense of first principles and a desire for intellectual challenge allows for agility, even with questions that seem to have no established answers.”
In her team, she endeavours to foster a culture of curiosity, creativity, resilience, collaboration, continuous improvement, and a willingness to keep learning.
“We’re all in a moment where the speed of change is so high, whether it’s disruption in society, disruption geopolitically, or disruption in technology, that the minute you get attached to a single outcome or a single way of being, you’re already obsolete.”
Teamwork skills are crucial. “You rarely come up with solutions in business, or anywhere, on your own,” Qadeer says. She used to be the president of Legal Leaders for Diversity and Inclusion, and holds those values close. “That’s done through collaboration, and truly recognizing the value others bring to the table.”
In this era of AI and new technologies, Qadeer believes a solid basis in humanities helps people grasp the ethical and societal dimensions, and consequences, of what businesses do on the road to achieving their objectives.
An avid reader, Qadeer seeks out interdisciplinary thinkers like Barry Lopez and Robert MacFarlane. A recent favourite book is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which weaves together science, art, poetry, and Indigenous knowledge.
“Folks shouldn’t limit themselves to just being subject matter experts. I do believe the world needs people who can thread the needle in a lot of different disciplines and understand how everything connects together.”
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