“Thank You, Sir”

On being underestimated, and what it taught me about credibility.

A few years into my career as a Crown Prosecutor, I was mid-trial, directing my primary witness - a Calgary police officer - through his evidence. I had a plan. A genuinely well-considered one. There was a reason I was asking the questions in the order I was asking them.

The judge didn’t see a plan. He saw a young woman he could interrupt.

So he did. Repeatedly. Mid-question, mid-thought, telling me how he thought I should be running my own case.

Here’s what nobody tells you about being a young female lawyer in a courtroom: you don’t get to say what you’re thinking, which in that moment was something closer to I have this handled, you can stop now. What you get to say, if you want to keep practicing law without becoming known as “difficult,” is “thank you, sir.” Several times. With a smile that costs you something every time you have to produce it.

I read the transcript back again recently. I actually cringed. Not because I did anything wrong - because I could see, in black and white, exactly how many times a man who outranked me in the room felt entitled to take over a job I was doing competently, and exactly how many times I had to absorb that gracefully because advocacy, it turns out, requires as much insight into ego and psychology as it does into law.

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That wasn’t an isolated moment. It was a pattern, and it showed up everywhere.

Defence lawyers, during plea negotiations, asking if I’d moved to Calgary “for a boy” - as if the only plausible reason a young woman ends up in a new city is romantic, not professional.

Witnesses - civilians and police officers both - visibly skeptical when they learned I was the Crown on their file. Some asked my age outright, in a tone that made clear they already had an answer and didn’t like it.

Police officers flirting with me. In court. In front of colleagues, judges, sometimes the accused. Not charming. Belittling. A way of reminding me, in a room where I was supposed to be running things, that some people still saw me as something else first.

I want to be precise about what this actually does to a person, because “it was annoying” doesn’t capture it. It’s a tax. Every interruption, every skeptical tone, every flirtation disguised as a compliment costs you something - focus, composure, the energy you needed for the actual job - and you pay that tax silently, because naming it out loud gets you labeled instead of heard.

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Here’s the part that took me longer to understand: being underestimated wasn’t only a cost. It was occasionally, strangely, useful.

By the end of a trial, I’d often hear some version of the same surprised praise. A senior officer once told me, verbatim, that I was “surprisingly brilliant.” I remember the exact look on a judge’s face - and an opposing counsel’s - after a cross-examination that (satisfyingly) landed exactly the way I’d planned it to. Visible surprise. Like they’d been quietly recalibrating who I was for the last ten minutes.

I won’t pretend that didn’t feel good. There’s a particular satisfaction in being underestimated and then simply doing the thing you were always capable of doing, and watching the room adjust in real time.

But I want to be honest about what that satisfaction actually is. It’s not empowerment. It’s relief. And needing relief means something was wrong in the first place - that the baseline assumption walking in was incompetence, not competence, and I had to overperform my way out of a hole I never should have been standing in.

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Now I sit across from women who are doing a version of the same math I did.

Not in a courtroom. On a client call, deciding whether to report something, preparing to give a statement, getting ready to testify. And I watch so many of them shrink before anyone’s even had the chance to doubt them.

They preempt the skepticism. They soften their own story before a single person has challenged it. They apologize for crying, or for not crying. They qualify everything - I know this sounds crazy, I know you probably think - because somewhere along the way, they learned what I learned in that courtroom: that being believed is not a given, especially if you’re a woman, especially if anything about you - your age, your appearance, your history, your job, what you were wearing, how you reacted in the moment - gives anyone an excuse to question you before you’ve said a word.

I understand that particular math from both sides. I understand it as a former prosecutor who watched credibility get assigned and withheld in real time, based on things that had nothing to do with whether someone was telling the truth. And I understand it as a survivor of sexual assault and domestic violence myself, who has sat in the exact chair my clients sit in, wondering if I’d be believed.

That’s not a credential I put on my website. But it’s the actual reason I do this work the way I do it.

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A huge part of what I do now is help women stop shrinking.

Not by telling them to be more confident, as if confidence is a switch. By helping them understand, concretely, what makes a credible witness - what to expect, what they’re allowed to say, what they don’t need to apologize for, how the system actually evaluates what they share, and where their case is genuinely strong even if they don’t feel strong telling it.

Because here’s what I know for certain, from both sides of that courtroom: being underestimated doesn’t mean you weren’t capable. It means someone else’s assumption got there before your evidence did. My job is to make sure that assumption doesn’t get the last word.

I spent years saying “yes, sir”, “thank you, sir” to keep the peace in rooms where I deserved more than tolerance. I’d like to help the women I work with skip that part entirely, and walk into the room already knowing exactly how good their case - and they - actually are.