Jennifer Roggemann LL.B.

Education
Called to Bar of Ontario, 2000
LL.B., University of Victoria Law School, 1998
B.A., (Psychology), University of Guelph

Memberships
Law Society of Upper Canada
Waterloo Law Association

Biography
Jennifer Roggemann moved from South Korea to Canada when she was in grade 11. “I wanted to be a lawyer when I was a little girl,” she explains, “but coming to a new country with a new language, new everything, it was not a dream that I thought I could achieve.”

Then her brother ran into some trouble with the law, and she became incensed when she saw how the court system treated people who couldn’t speak the language. She promised herself that if she became fluent in English, she would go into law. She did just that, beginning her legal career at Deutschmann and Kelly, an up-and-coming firm in Kitchener-Waterloo looking for a junior lawyer.

Roggemann spent four years at the firm, including two years as a partner. She took on her first immigration case in 2000, when her good Korean client asked her help in getting his son’s Korean bride into Canada. “I brought her back and then somebody else came, and somebody else came, and voil�, I had a practice,” she explains.

When Deutschmann and Kelly decided that immigration law no longer fit within their focus, she struck out on her own. She met local immigration lawyer Margaret Skowronski-Binek, who served as her role model and mentor. When Skowronski-Binek retired, Roggemann took over her practice and hasn’t looked back.

In her spare time, Roggemann helped to set up the Free Legal Immigration Clinic in Kitchener and Cambridge, where she volunteers five hours a month, and organized a highly successful peace forum for Toronto’s Korean community in 2004.