Team player Amanda Santache thrives on Osgoode’s Criminal Law and Procedure LLM

Amanda Santache feels right at home as part of a team.

Inspired by her undergraduate years as a varsity hockey player, Santache – a recent graduate of OsgoodePD’s Professional LLM in Criminal Law and Procedure – originally thought she might put her professional skills to work as a sports agent, before earning a spot on the roster of a large full-service law firm as a member of its corporate commercial litigation department straight out of law school.

“I loved the collaborative aspect of largescale files; the kind where you’re working with several lawyers at once, bouncing ideas off each other,” Santache says.

Still, there was something about the substance of the civil law disputes occupying her time that didn’t quite resonate with Santache.

“I went back to basics and thought about what interested me in law school and that was criminal law,” she says. “So I met with some criminal lawyers who had made a similar switch before me and they were kind enough to mentor me and help me make the jump to criminal law.”

Since 2020, she has been a prosecutor with Quebec’s Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions, where the nature of her work in the organized crime unit of its Major Crimes and Special Affairs Office helped ease the transition to her new practice area.  

“There was a learning curve like everything else, but even though I was new to criminal law, I knew how to operate on big files with millions of documents and collaborate with other lawyers on big questions,” Santache says.

She quickly made her mark on her new field, winning the Young Bar of Montreal’s 2023 Lawyer of the Year Award for criminal law. Santache has also helped teach an advanced criminal law course at McGill University and takes part in a number of university mentoring programs.

Santache found another great group of teammates among her colleagues at Osgoode, where the diversity of professional backgrounds represented in her LLM cohort allowed her to graduate with a more rounded view of criminal law and procedure in Canada.

“In our profession – in litigation especially – it’s easy to get into a bubble where you’re on one side of the court and you don’t know how the defence lawyers or the judges are thinking,” Santache explains. “It was a big advantage to interact with classmates who were defence lawyers with various sub-specialties, as well as local prosecutors, federal prosecutors and court martial prosecutors. In addition, some participants were not lawyers at all and work in fields like privacy, cyber security or IT and I enjoyed getting their viewpoints on how things work.”

Santache pinpoints the Criminal Law & the Charter course, taught by Program Director Benjamin Berger, as one of her LLM highlights.

“Not many of us had read and discussed a full case or dissent in years, so it was a little daunting, but ultimately very rewarding. In the end, you get out of the experience what you put in. Overall, it was a great academic experience,” she says.

“Often in practice, you will find that proceedings can become run of the mill. Since taking the LLM, I find that I am more reflective about what I am doing, prompting me to question how things have always been done and see if there are other ways to proceed,” Santache adds.

Like many of the required and elective courses on the Criminal Law and Procedure LLM program, Prof. Berger’s class proceeded largely online. Over the years, Osgoode has built a reputation as a pioneer of interactive online learning, allowing students to fit in evening classes around their full-time jobs across the country. Still, Santache admits she was a little skeptical about how closely the remote learning experience would resemble an in-person classroom.

“I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but Prof. Berger moderated the class wonderfully. Everyone was actually participating and he made sure that the discussion remained fluid, which is not always the case when you’re online,” she says. 

According to Santache, professionals who have spent their entire career in criminal law have just as much to gain from Osgoode’s Criminal Law and Procedure LLM program as relative newcomers to the area.  

“If you’re looking to change things up or renew your sense of purpose in what you do, this is a great option,” she says. “When you’re busy with paperwork and focused on the task at hand, you sometimes have to work to unearth those feelings, but for me, the program was a very nice reminder about why I first got into the field and helped me get back into thinking about the bigger picture.”