Hiu Tung Cheung

When Hiu Tung Cheung began her career as an auditor at EY, she never expected that two decades later she would be completing a Master of Laws. “My background is really accounting,” she explains. “I have my CPA designation, and as I progressed in my career, I moved toward tax. I’ve always been very strong in tax accounting and the practical aspect of tax, but as I became more senior, I was dealing a lot with lawyers, legal structures, and agreements, and I wanted to go deeper into that aspect.”

Cheung ultimately chose to pursue OsgoodePD’s Professional LLM in Business Law, which she saw as the ideal bridge between her technical tax expertise and the legal reasoning that increasingly shaped her work. Today, she is a Tax Partner in EY’s Global Compliance and Reporting practice, serving financial institutions across Canada. With more than 18 years of experience, she has worked with life insurers, property and casualty insurers, and mortgage insurers, advising on Canadian domestic taxation, tax accounting, restructurings, financing, cross-border structuring, and Pillar Two implementation. Her deep exposure to regulatory and tax frameworks shaped what she needed from a graduate program.

“I was debating whether I would do a Master’s in Tax,” she recalls. “But the material would have been quite repetitive from what I already knew. I thought the LLM in Business Law would be a good complement to what I actually do.”

At the time, Cheung was working extensively in mergers and acquisitions and collaborating with treasury teams and legal counsel. “I do a lot of transaction and M&A work from a tax perspective,” she says. “But we were also asked to review legal agreements. The background in corporate law that the program offered was very interesting because I could take electives like Corporate Finance and International Tax, which were extremely complementary to my day-to-day work.”

Cheung appreciated the instructors’ ability to make the coursework meaningful. “The lecturers actually try to make it applicable to our day-to-day,” she explains. One professor even replaced a written exam with a structured debate. “It was exciting, engaging, and fun. At this point in my career, if I show up to class, it’s because I actually want to learn something.”

She also valued the range of professional backgrounds in the program. “I didn’t expect it would be a room of lawyers,” she says. “A lot of people came in from accounting or finance, working with corporate structures, corporate lawyers, or boards.” For non-lawyers, she found the additional support particularly helpful: “There was even an extra class where we were taught how to take notes when reading court cases. That was very helpful.”

Outside her client work, Cheung is an active educator and speaker. She has instructed for the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants’ In-Depth Tax Program, taught for CPA Québec, and regularly presents at Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association conferences. A McGill graduate fluent in English and French, she also mentors junior professionals as part of EY’s Professional Women’s Network and previously chaired the EY Asian Pacific Business Development Committee.

Reflecting on the program, Cheung says its value comes from how students choose to approach it. “What you get from the program is the investment that you put in,” she notes. For professionals ready to stretch their thinking and connect their learning to real-world work, she sees the LLM as a meaningful next step that can open new pathways.