Michelle Pockey has spent her career solving problems and bringing people together. But the 47-year-old lawyer now finds herself facing the biggest challenge of her life.
“It’s really quite uncertain whether I’ll be able to go back to work,” the Fasken Martineau DuMoulin partner said during a telephone interview days before undergoing another round of radiation treatment. “This is terminal, incurable cancer. I kind of need a miracle.”
The experience has Pockey thinking of herself as her own client, using the skills she’s developed over her 20-year career as a lawyer specializing in environmental law and corporate responsibility.
“It’s trying to find the answers and the solutions and trying to lever my relationships and networks to find that,” she said. “It’s sort of the same exercise. Sometimes being methodical about it helps when it’s a very tough mental and emotional exercise.”
Pockey got her start as a litigator in the area of environmental law during a time when those laws were changing in British Columbia. Many of the cases concerned determining who was responsible for addressing contaminated land.
“I really started to see the impact of environment on lives … and thinking about how we regulate environment in the context of everything else we do,” Pockey said.
Pockey then focused her practice on business, working mostly with mining and energy companies that wanted to develop projects in remote areas of B.C. and the Yukon. That work often required negotiating with First Nations communities and teaching companies about the depth of responsibility required to successfully make those partnerships.
She said she has a few mining companies among her clients that, having purchased a mine or another company, do not see themselves as beholden to the previous owners’ social responsibilities.
“They don’t understand that if the company had a life in a different form, if the company operated the mine going back in time, that the community will see that company and every company after it as the same person,” she said.
Pockey is known for being a thoughtful and rigorous lawyer, said Simon Fraser University chancellor, writer and lawyer Anne Giardini.
But Giardini reserves her strongest praise for Pockey’s efforts to support and advance women in law and business. In 1997 Pockey co-founded the Professional Women’s Network, an organization that now has 1,200 members across Canada, and she sits on the board of several other women’s advancement groups.
“She’s fiercely dedicated to seeing women take their rightful place in the world, including in the economy, and she’s a promoter of women-led interests,” Giardini said.
That career-long interest in making connections within the business community has been a source of strength for Pockey as she faces terminal cancer.
“The beauty of this experience has been all the people who have come together for me around this, who have done miraculous things and who have shown up in droves to support me,” she said.
“And it’s mostly from the business community, it’s from my non-profit board life, it’s other lawyers who have been on the other side of cases with me.”
Join us March 8th when Business in Vancouver celebrates the 17th annual Influential Women in Business Awards at the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel. For further information or to register for the event visit the events page at www.biv.com/events/iwib.
