Honouring Ritu Khullar as a Manager and Mentor

Ritu Khullar was the Chief Justice of Alberta and the Chief Justice of the Courts of Appeal of Alberta, Nunavut, and Northwest Territories. She died from brain cancer on September 3, 2026, at the age of 62, after being either a lawyer or judge for 34 years. Her litigation, writing, and judgment- rendering legacies are vast. Her broad swaths of subjects and interests are available in digital law reports like CanLII and various law review/reports publications. I want to honour two of her legacies that are harder to find in the public record – that of manager and mentor. She was both to me. She was also my friend.

Ritu spent more time managing other legal professionals than most, first as the managing partner of a small labour law firm and then as the Chief Justice of three appellate courts. People management is not a subject most of us cover in our legal educations, and it can be difficult to undertake while also maintaining a legal practice or judging schedule. Like referees or umpires, the best leaders in legal environments often fly under the radar. The people around them have confidence in their leadership, and their good decisions do not attract scrutiny. Like her other pursuits, Ritu took her manager roles seriously and deliberately, and turned the basic mechanics of good management into the skills of an inspiring leader and cherished mentor.

Ritu had several mantras by which she lived and worked, and one of them was to simply “show up”. I doubt she spent a lot of time aspiring to leadership roles because, although she had great respect for the offices leaders held, she was not self-aggrandizing. But when Ritu decided to take on a leadership role, she showed up for the people she worked with and made sure she knew about their struggles and celebrations, whether professional or personal.

When people brought difficulties to her, she reacted compassionately and proactively by figuring out how those difficulties could be addressed and hopefully avoided in the future. Once a staff member needed to go on medical leave but, mistakenly believing their spouse’s benefits covered them, had not signed up for the law firm’s benefit packages. Ritu and the other partners paid the staff member’s wage benefits themselves, and Ritu changed the policy to require all employees to enroll in the firm’s plans.

Another mantra she lived by was to work hard and she encouraged others to do the same. She grew up around hard workers, including her teacher parents who emigrated to Canada in the 1960s. Also, she deeply appreciated the hard work that founded the small, northern Alberta communities she grew up in. She had a keen intellect and was probably the brightest person in any room she occupied, but she never substituted aptitude for work ethic. She set high standards for people around her, which could be intimidating, but she also helped people achieve those standards.

By the time Ritu became managing partner, she had experienced the thrills, crushing workload, and pressures of arguing cases at the Supreme Court of Canada many times, on remarkably disparate subjects such as the privacy in diaries in a sexual assault trial (R v Shearing, 2002 SCC 58), the constitutionality of egg marketing restrictions based on residence (Canadian Egg Marketing Agency v. Richardson, [1998] 3 SCR 157), and the omission of sexual orientation from human rights legislation (Vriend v Alberta, [1998] 1 SCR 493). Though she had several more trips to the SCC before her appointment to the bench, Ritu also prioritized ensuring other lawyers in the office got the same opportunity. She was confident they could work hard enough to do the firm and its clients proud, made them believe it too, and purposefully and thoughtfully set out to share the opportunities and workload.

Another lasting Ritu mantra that will live on in those of us lucky enough to have worked with her, is to have a little fun. Life is short, cruelly so for some, and you need to enjoy what you are doing and who you are doing it with. You also need to have a laugh, even, or perhaps especially, when faced with devastating losses and seemingly insurmountable problems. Ritu’s spouse, Rob Reynolds, helped her find funny and fitting t-shirts to wear to partners’ budget meetings, such as one that said, “Keep Calm and Carry On”, that she wore after some unexpected and unwelcome changes to the partnership. Another t-shirt said, “Grumpy”, and had a picture of a character from Snow White that summed up Ritu’s attitude at a particular budget meeting.

One time I slunk back to the office after a labour hearing had gone spectacularly wrong. My star witness had flamed out on the stand, and I recounted to Ritu example after example of the witness giving plausible and reasonable answers in preparation but then giving completely different and self-sabotaging answers on the stand. After about the seventh example, Ritu started laughing. And she laughed hard. She reminded me that people’s unpredictability is an ever-present aspect of litigation, noted that if the situation were in a movie it would not have been so absurdly scripted, and encouraged me to laugh even when I wanted to cry. She then recruited some of the other lawyers to regale me with their most unpredictable flame-out stories, and I felt a little lighter. For Ritu, the fun came from shared community, a willingness not to take herself or others too seriously, and the flexibility and humility to know that you can only control so much.

Ritu accomplished much in a relatively short life, and so many of her lasting and unwritten legacies are in the people who watched her, listened to her, worked with her, made arguments on the opposite side of her, and appeared before her. Though she worked tremendously hard to achieve her own professional accomplishments, she also found joy and delight in leading, working with, and mentoring others.