Current Students

Cole Eisen graduated from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in 2020. Before law school, Cole was an active member of a large private sector union and a policy researcher at the Canadian Labour Congress. Cole pursued his passion for workers’ rights and trade unionism during law school as a volunteer caseworker at Advocates for Injured Workers, a legal aid clinic. In 2018, Cole was a summer student at Building Trades Workers’ Services where he advocated for unionized tradespersons in workers’ compensation claims. During the summer of 2019, Cole worked at Cavalluzzo.

Cole has published multiple articles and papers on labour and pension law. In 2020, he received the Canadian Industrial Relations Association Law of Work Award for the best legal paper presented by an emerging scholar at the 10th International Labour and Employment Relations Association (ILERA) Regional Congress for the Americas. Cole also holds a B.A. in Industrial Relations from McGill University where he earned the Laddie Millen Memorial Prize for placing first in the program.

Sydney Lang graduated from the McGill University Faculty of Law in 2019 with degrees in civil and common law. At McGill she participated in the Indigenous Field Studies course in Kahnawake and completed electives in Spanish. She spent the final term of her law degree on exchange at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

After her first year of law school, Sydney volunteered at a community legal clinic for migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. She remained involved with the movement for migrant rights as a caseworker at the Immigrant Workers’ Centre in Montreal. Sydney furthered her commitment to social and economic justice as a board member of a support staff union at McGill where she advocated for increased job security and pay equity for casual workers. While at McGill, Sydney also coordinated the Disability and Law program, acted as the Director of Communications of the Legal Information Clinic at McGill, and developed a seminar on the topic of business and human rights.  

Since moving to Toronto in 2012, Sydney has been actively involved in community organizing around climate justice and corporate accountability in the extractive sector.

Prior to law school, Sydney completed a BA from the University of Toronto in anthropology, equity studies, and gender studies. She was a summer student at the firm in 2019.

Ocean Avriel graduated from the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law in 2020. Prior to law school, Ocean managed two national youth advocacy programs supporting marginalized, LGBTQI2S+ and Indigenous youth across the country.

Throughout law school, Ocean demonstrated a commitment to serving his community. In his first year of law school, Ocean founded StreetSmart: an arts-based, legal education organization that serves street-involved youth who often distrust traditional legal services. Additionally, Ocean spent a summer with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association working on a variety of Charter, administrative and criminal law cases and interventions. In his final year of law school, Ocean participated in the University of Ottawa Refugee Sponsorship Support Program where he collaboratively drafted a refugee application for a transgender couple seeking resettlement in Canada.

Prior to starting at Cavalluzzo, Ocean assisted a small law firm in A.B. v. Ontario (Education), where they represented a transgender elementary student challenging the provincial government’s revocation of the 2015 sexual education curriculum at the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. As an intern with the firm, Ocean also worked on a number of employment and human rights cases.

During his law degree, Ocean was recognized for his outstanding community involvement and academic excellence. He is the recipient of the P. Andrèe-Wylie Scholarship; the University of Ottawa Public Interest Fellowship; the Rovinescu Award of Excellence; and the Allan Rock Scholars Fund.

Serwaah Phebih received her JD upon graduating from Osgoode Hall Law School in 2020. With an intent to become part of the legal profession from a young age, she utilized her time at law school to pursue her passion for social justice work. Through her work with Osgoode’s chapters of Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights and the International Refugee Assistance Project, she gained knowledge of public interest lawyering on a global scale. Following her first year in 2018, she was put this knowledge to practice whilst working for the Legal Resource Centre in South Africa, a non-profit legal clinic that has geared itself towards serving marginalized, indigent, and landless communities across the country since the apartheid era.

Upon returning to Osgoode, Serwaah sought to apply her experience to human rights work in the domestic context, as a participant in the Anti-Discrimination Intensive Program (ADIP). Here, she was tasked with conducting intake, drafting and amending human rights applications, and leading mediations on behalf of clients of the Human Rights Legal Support Centre. It is this experience that ignited her passion for labour and employment law and workers’ rights.

ADIP also led Serwaah to her position with the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic (BSCC) in 2019, where she was able to work on the clinic’s #AndMeToo project, proffering legal advocacy and support to woman-identifying persons experiencing sexual violence in the workplace. She balanced this work along with her participation with BSCC’s Criminalization of Women project, which offers legal representation to survivors of intimate-partner violence navigating the criminal law system. In her capacity as a summer student, Serwaah contributed by interviewing clients, drafting memos, and visiting court to assist in ongoing litigation.

Serwaah earned her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and English Language and Literature from the University of Western Ontario in 2017, graduating with distinction.