The legal field is known to be extremely competitive. Lawyers are often smart, ambitious, and highly educated. That being said, what does it take to stand out and become a “Top Lawyer” in your specific field of law? In this interview series called “5 Things You Need To Become A Top Lawyer In Your Specific Field of Law”, we are talking to top lawyers who share what it takes to excel and stand out in your industry.
As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kyla Lee.
Kyla Lee is a prominent criminal defense lawyer in Vancouver, British Columbia, focusing on driving offenses. In 2019 Kyla was recognized as one of the top 25 most influential lawyers in Canada. She has appeared at all levels of court in Canada, including at the Supreme Court of Canada on impaired driving cases.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit more. What is the “backstory” that brought you to this particular career path in Law? Did you want to be an attorney “when you grew up”?
Ialways wanted to be a lawyer even when I was a very little kid. I have a story that my grandmother used to love telling. We used to walk together to Sunday school down the road from her house. One day while we were walking I looked up at her and I said, “Grandy, I want to be a lawyer when I grow up.” She nodded and smiled and said, “That’s nice,” thinking it was just another thing that children say but that was the day I made up my mind that I wanted to be a lawyer and so from elementary school I worked toward that goal.
How I ended up in the area I’m in is a different story. I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia in the First Nations Studies Program and applied to law school there. In law school I had the intention of becoming a lawyer practicing aboriginal law. However as I completed courses in this area, I soon realized that aboriginal law would require me to spend decades working on a single case and that I might only ever work on one case for the course of my career. I wanted a little more mental stimulation than that. Criminal law was the most interesting to me because it had a lot of salacious interesting facts.
