For much of his life, Brian Studniberg, a partner at the litigation boutique Henein Hutchison Robitaille LLP, knew he was different. He just didn’t know why. Socially, he has always been at ease in small groups and quiet settings. But parties? Restaurants? Crowded bars? Bustling places—the kind that make other people come alive—are confounding to him. Conversation becomes impossible to follow. “I’ve been told that I often have a vacant expression,” he says. “It’s because I’m straining so hard to process what I’m hearing that it takes all my attention. That internal focus makes it look as though I’m not present. I don’t blame anyone for thinking, This person doesn’t want to be here.”
From a young age, Studniberg has been uncomfortable in noisy settings. Was he hearing-impaired? Not that anyone could tell. In quiet settings, he heard people just fine. He was also a straight-A student and was tested for placement in a gifted program. “My folks didn’t need to attend parent-teacher interviews,” he says. “There was nothing to talk about.”
After high school, he did a bunch of degrees—commerce at York, a master’s in public policy at Queen’s—before enrolling, in 2004, in the joint law and MBA program at the University of Toronto, where he graduated near the top of his class, winning the Bronze Medal in his final year. And yet he found himself at odds with legal culture.
On the job market, he could certainly catch the attention of recruiters. When seeking a summer position in his second year of law school, he landed an on-campus interview with virtually every firm he applied to. But relatively few invited him back for a second interview during in-firm week. Ultimately, he summered and articled at McMillan LLP, but, in 2009, the firm declined to hire him back as an associate. He’d capably handled the work, Studniberg recalls, but he never felt that he fit into the firm’s culture.
Studniberg then went to work at Couzin Taylor LLP, a tax-law affiliate of the accounting giant EY, where he flourished: he had a knack for the practice area and built a strong rapport with his colleagues. (Couzin Taylor later merged with another firm to become EY Law LLP.) Studniberg’s difficulties never went away, but, since he was working in a small team where he was able to establish close relationships, his difficulties didn’t affect his career all that much.
In 2015, his wife, Ellie Avishai, got into a Ph.D. program in education leadership at Harvard, and the couple relocated to Boston with their two young boys. There, Studniberg did an LLM at Harvard, wrote the Massachusetts bar and began applying to local firms. He landed a job in the tax group at Ropes & Gray LLP, the prestigious American firm with offices across the globe. Still, Studniberg craved a diagnosis. In Boston, he’d been tested by several different audiologists, who confirmed what he’d already suspected: his hearing was fine. One, however, gave him a document with the names of other specialists he might seek out. Phone in hand, Studniberg worked down the list. Most people he called were as baffled by his symptoms as he was. Then one person said, “Come see me.”In the fall of 2018, Studniberg was 37 years old and in another soundproof booth, having his hearing tested yet again. This time the tests were different. The focus wasn’t on noise, in general, but rather on noise differentiation—the ability to concentrate on one sound among many. At last, Studniberg got a definitive answer: he had a severe auditory processing disorder, a condition of the brain, not the ears.
To a degree, we can all relate. Beyond a certain threshold, all of us struggle to distinguish competing noises. But for Studniberg, the presence of competing chatter or ambient noise, even at a moderate volume, can make the conversation he’s having unintelligible. Compounding the problem, he can also struggle to detect changes in pitch, making it difficult to pick up on the meaning that people convey through intonation, especially in loud environments. When the noise dies down, though, his comprehension markedly improves.
The diagnosis was a turning point in Studniberg’s life. “It created the most profound sense of relief,” he says. “It felt almost like serenity. I knew at last that what I was experiencing was a consequence of other forces—that there was a deeper cause.” To reward himself, he bought the best set of noise-cancelling headphones he could find. At Ropes & Gray, he requested (and got) a private office with a door. Yet he didn’t talk widely about his diagnosis. “I wanted to be quietly enmeshed in the organization,” he says, “to be known for my contributions, not for making demands or requiring accommodations.”
In 2019, Avishai finished her studies, and the family returned to Toronto. Studniberg, drawing on his Ivy League pedigree and experience at a major U.S. firm, got hired at what’s now called Henein Hutchison Robitaille—a firm that’s well known for criminal defence but was expanding further into other areas like civil litigation, including some tax work. From day one, says founding partner Marie Henein, Studniberg has been a key member of the firm’s brain trust: “Brian is a talking encyclopedia. He will take on a case and hold every detail in his head in a way that very few people can.”
“My firm hires a lot of junior lawyers,” says Brian Studniberg. “I want them, as well as the other lawyers, to know that we’re all humans. I also want to model other kinds of success, to show that there are various ways to be a leader.”
Having proven himself, Studniberg decided, in 2021, that he was ready to formally come out about his condition. So he met with Danielle Robitaille—a trusted colleague who later became the firm’s managing partner—and she immediately began seeking ways to support him. “The job of the firm is to be available, flexible and creative,” says Robitaille.
This isn’t just a matter of interpersonal decency, she adds; it’s good business. If you want to get the best out of your staff, Robitaille reasons, you must create conditions under which they will thrive. Studniberg attends strategy meetings, where the conversation can be dynamic and boisterous. He does his best to participate in real time, but he also often submits his thoughts in writing after the fact. At legal parties, he often has a wingmate by his side, usually a colleague, to slow down the conversation or steer it to a calmer corner of the room. When possible, he takes meetings with contacts in quiet restaurants during off-peak hours.
Henein says that she sees something of herself in Studniberg. “Schmoozy drinking functions were never my thing, either,” she explains. “Even as a young lawyer, I felt uncomfortable at them. I didn’t like shouting to be heard. I didn’t like selling myself like a widget. And often, I didn’t find the interactions meaningful.” From the beginning of her career, she has wanted to cultivate a more personalized approach to the practice of law: “When I’d connect with somebody one-on-one—over lunch or coffee or while collaborating on a case—the connection was more meaningful.”
Often, Henein says, discussion around workplace DEI seems to argue that employers are doing diverse workers a favour by hiring or accommodating them. In her view, it’s the employer that stands to benefit: when you open yourself to diverse aptitudes, you get a better team. “The assumption that every lawyer comes in the same shape and size is silly,” she says. “I don’t want a team with the same strengths. I want a constellation of talent.”
Since coming out about his diagnosis, Studniberg has decided to speak even more openly to colleagues. “My firm hires a lot of junior lawyers,” he says. “I want them, as well as the other lawyers, to know that we’re all humans. I also want to model other kinds of success, to show that there are various ways to be a leader.”
He has come to suspect that his disability and his talents are not just coexistent but mutually reinforcing. Feeling uncomfortable, from a young age, in noisy, crowded spaces, he cultivated the kind of mental habits that are best suited for silence—slow thinking, rigorous analysis, attention to detail. These faculties are ideal for crucial aspects of a career in law. “Brian’s hyperfocus is his superpower,” says Robitaille. “To have him on your team is to have an edge your opponent lacks.”
Photography by Nick Wong.