A skilled and tenacious advocate for trade unions, employees and individuals, Naomi Greckol-Herlich has particular expertise in managing concurrent criminal and regulatory proceedings. She brings a unique compassion to her work, which often involves assisting individuals navigating deeply stressful and difficult circumstances.
Naomi practices labour and employment law, professional discipline, human rights law and criminal defense. She regularly advises trade unions and individual employees on matters involving discipline or investigations in the workplace, human rights issues, accommodation issues, harassment and bullying in the workplace, employment contracts, severance packages and wrongful dismissals. Naomi appears regularly before labour arbitrators, professional discipline bodies and other tribunals, and has acted as counsel on a number of criminal matters before the Ontario Court of Justice, Superior Court of Ontario, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court.
Naomi graduated from the McGill Faculty of Law with degrees in both Common and Civil Law. She won the Blakes Scholar Award for academic achievement and extra-curricular engagement, and was the recipient of the Novak-Weil Award, given annually to a student participating in an international internship focused on human rights advocacy. While in law school, Naomi also represented students facing disciplinary proceedings, worked at a legal clinic for low-income individuals, conducted legal research for the McGill University International Criminal Justice Legal Clinic, and served as co-chair of OutLaw McGill, the Queer students’ association.
Before law school, Naomi completed an MA in World History at Northeastern University, a BA in History at Smith College, and worked as a Research Associate at Harvard Business School where she authored and contributed to numerous HBS Publications. She also enjoyed a brief but wondrous career as a semi-professional baseball player with the Canadian Women’s National Team, other teams in New England and Japan.
Naomi is a member of the Canadian Association of Labour Lawyers, Criminal Lawyers’ Association, The Advocates’ Society and the Ontario Bar Association.
Decisions of Interest
- Naomi became the only lawyer to have secured a decision at the College of Teachers in which the Discipline Panel ordered that the member’s name ought not be made public despite the requirement under the Protecting Students Act, 2016 that all Discipline Committee decisions, including the member’s name, be published. This case also marks the first time that the Discipline Committee of the College of Teachers withheld the name of a member in the absence of a court-ordered publication to do so.
- Along with UPFH colleague Saman Wickramasinghe, Naomi secured an extremely rare directed verdict in a criminal matter leading to the withdrawal of all charges against the client, including six counts of sexual assault, five counts of sexual exploitation and one count of sexual interference.
- Acting before the Supreme Court of Canada as counsel to an intervenor (Criminal Lawyers’ Association) in a digital privacy rights matter, Naomi helped persuade the court that individuals maintain a right to privacy in the content of sent text messages retrieved from the phones of the recipient.