Canadian Lawyer

to conduct an investigation on behalf of an important client of the law firm, an insurance company trying to see how it can be legally saved from paying out a $20-million claim on a Manet painting owned by one Victor Bushnell. The precious artwork goes missing at a gallery named after Bushnell during a gala for "500 of his close, personal friends." Bushnell, who eventually gets his comeuppance thanks to the lawyer's sharpness, is "a self-made billionaire who got his start by developing an online payment system that made access to pay-per-view porn sites easier, In the end, she says, the lead character needed to be a lawyer into more legitimate online payment services, investing heavily in some of the Internet's biggest successes." "No case like that," McKenzie is quick to point out when " McKenzie writes. "Once he sold that business, he moved asked how she came up with the plot. "I knew I wanted her to be investigating something because I think the law as a day-to-day career is very hard to translate into the written word, unless it is a trial book and I don't write trial books — John Grisham does." Where litigation and fiction do intersect is in the necessary skills underpinning both, says McKenzie, who is in her 12th year of practice at Irving Mitchell Kalichman LLP, the Montreal litigation boutique where she also articled before being called to the bar following law studies at McGill University. "There is a lot of writing to litigation. A big part of the job is writing proceedings, writing letters, writing factum — and those are stories, things that need to tell a story and be convinc- ing to be good, a simple but compelling way was good training for fiction and another intersection is the discipline that comes with the job. "It's a job full of deadlines. You have to have a large capacity for work and learn to be efficient. Lots of people have ideas for books, but it does take some discipline and efficiency to actually sit down and translate that into something. " says McKenzie. "So learning to write things in first to admit she doesn't have perfect discipline for fiction writ- ing, but takes moments outside of her legal work when she can. How exactly does she do it, given that she is part of one of " McKenzie is the the legal teams working on the biggest class action in Canadian history — the landmark case in Quebec Superior Court against three of the country's largest tobacco companies with an esti- mated $27 billion in claims at stake. "I am not an early riser, unfortunately — that would solve a lot of my problems," says McKenzie about her fiction-writing schedule. "When I do have time, I do try and fit in a little bit of time, usually at night, after supper for 45 minutes or an hour if I can, and on the weekends," she says. "I set small goals for myself, 500 words, or if I am in an editing process, 'work on this chapter, fix this chapter, this week,' because if you look at the big picture, which is 90,000 words approximately, it is kind of imposing and terrifying and seems undoable. I have really learned to fit it in and often that means not beating myself up, sometimes I just don't have time. She's also an avid runner and says, when running alone and " not with a friend, she often works through ideas or plot scenes in her head. Discipline is part methodology and, like legal drafting for litigation, keeping a running chronology is one of the keys to staying on track with a developing story for her novels, she says. In fact, legal drafting and legal research are highly underrated, www.CANADIAN Lawyermag.com JULY 2012 21 McKenzie asserts, pointing to both as what keeps her passion- ate about practising law, the career she always wanted from the time she was a teenager. "What initially drew me to law is that I have always enjoyed getting into an argument — and by that I don't mean fighting with people — deciphering arguments and debating them with people. I always enjoyed that, but there are other things about it that kept me interested once I found out what they were, like drafting and I enjoy legal research. Every day is different and you are learning new things all the time. McKenzie has never been to Africa, one of the locations in " 38-year-old. She is now at work on a fourth book. A Canadian- American production company has bought the rights to turn her novel Spin into a movie and that book was also declared a bestseller in Quebec when it was translated into French with the title Ivresse (a German language edition is also available). Her novel Arranged also launched this past June in Quebec as Sur Mesure and Forgotten will most likely follow suit. CYBERBAHN® LITIGATION SUPPORT SERVICES Issuing a claim in Toronto? Filing a motion in York Region? 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Whatever the formula, so far it is clearly working for the

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