Practice Areas: Student-at-Law

Steven recently graduated from the Juris Doctor program at the University of Western Ontario. While attending law school he received several academic honours. He was on the Dean’s Honour List (top 10% of class) and received awards for achieving the highest grade in his Civil Procedure course (out of close to 200 students) and International Tax Law course. Steven also worked as a research assistant in Bankruptcy and Insolvency Law and was a member of Western’s Bowman National Tax Moot team for 2020. In 2019, following his second year of law school, Steven joined DSF as a summer law student during which time he assisted with many Commercial Litigation and Small Claims Court files.

Prior to studying law, Steven completed his Master’s degree and Ph.D. in Environmental Science at the University of Toronto. As a graduate student, Steven worked as a teaching assistant in multiple courses and his research has resulted in four publications in leading peer-reviewed journals.

Steven also has experience working in Toronto’s real estate industry. He enjoys interacting with people and problem solving, which is in large part what motivated him to become a lawyer.

Kathrin Gardhouse joined Devry Smith Frank LLP as an articling student in August 2020.

Kathrin completed the Global Profession Master of Laws (GPLLM) at the University of Toronto in 2020. She has previously been trained in German civil law at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster, where she graduated among the top two percentile nationwide in 2016.  Upon emigrating to Canada in 2016, Kathrin expanded her education by conducting two years of graduate studies in philosophy at McMaster University in Hamilton with special emphasis on philosophy of law. For her major research project “Comparative constitutional law – binding and persuasive precedent”, Kathrin was awarded a SSHRC scholarship. She withdrew from the PhD program in good standing in order to become licensed in law in Ontario and commenced her accreditation process in 2019.

Other than in Germany and Canada, Kathrin also studied law in Luxembourg for one year and completed two internships in the United States, with the Beaver County District Attorneys and a sole family and estates law practitioner in Pittsburgh respectively.

Kathrin worked part-time as a legal assistant for a family and fertility lawyer in Toronto while completing the GPLLM. There she gained valuable experience in contract drafting and financial disclosure proceedings.

In her free time, Kathrin is a passionate Salsa, Bachata, and Kizomba dancer. She plays beach volleyball and enjoys woodwork and sewing.