How this general counsel learned to see the big picture

In 2010, Aleksandra Zivanovic wanted to sharpen her legal skills. It’s not that she was a bad lawyer. To the contrary, she was a talented litigator at a mid-sized insurance defence firm. Over the course of her career, which was nearly a decade long, she had racked up plenty of positive outcomes.

But Zivanovic wanted to deepen her knowledge of legal theory. “I wasn’t getting that experience at work,” she says. “I needed to find another way to advance my skills.”

Zivanovic decided to enroll in the civil-litigation specialization of the Osgoode Professional LLM, a rigorous graduate program that she could complete on a part-time basis. The coursework was practical, and it included an invaluable session on trial planning.

“In litigation, there’s a tendency to look for an immediate solution to every problem,” says Zivanovic. “But it’s better to slow down and think through how each new problem affects the case as a whole. The program helped me understand that fact.”

Today, Zivanovic is the associate general counsel of SGI Canada, where she oversees the insurance company’s entire slate of ongoing litigation. And in this senior position, she can never lose sight of the big picture. “It’s all about strategic thinking,” she says. “I often move between large-scale discussions of legal strategy to the finer matters of an individual case. My LLM is paying off in spades now.”