Katrina Berube

Katrina’s path to family law didn’t start in family law at all — it started when seven-year-old Katrina watched a documentary on the atrocities of World War II, felt their horror as if it were her own, and has been asking a question ever since: what does it actually mean to help each other heal through the inevitable pain of being human?

Born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, Katrina grew up wanting to become an international human rights lawyer. That calling took shape early — before ever leaving Korea, she was involved in advocacy work seeking justice for survivors of Japan’s wartime military sexual slavery during World War II, standing alongside people whose suffering had gone unacknowledged for decades. It was there she first learned what real advocacy looks like: not grand gestures, but showing up, listening, and fighting for people the system had overlooked.

She carried that conviction to Canada, focusing her studies in international human rights at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. From 2007 onward, she represented approximately 200 refugees in Toronto — people rebuilding their entire lives from nothing, often after unimaginable loss. Every case was, at its core, the same question she started with: how do you help someone survive one of the hardest moments of their life, and come out the other side still whole?

After moving to Vancouver in 2016, Katrina expanded her practice into immigration law, civil litigation, and collaborative family law — and it was here, working alongside couples going through separation and divorce, that something clicked. This, too, was human rights work. Not the kind that makes headlines, but the quieter kind: helping ordinary people navigate one of life’s most destabilizing moments with dignity intact.

That realization became the foundation of Emerald Simple Divorce. Divorce is not a courtroom battle to be won — it’s a human moment to be handled with care. Life is too vast, and too full of potentials, to be defined by any single event, including separation or divorce. We are all human; we make mistakes, and we grow. What matters most is the life that continues afterward — and whether the process to get there was handled with honesty, transparency, and respect.

This is the work Katrina is committed to: guiding couples through separation and divorce with the same conviction that first brought her into this profession — that everyone going through this transition deserves legal support that makes it as dignified as possible, so healing, and the next chapter, can begin.

Fluent in both English and Korean, she brings that same clarity of communication to every client she works with.

Outside the practice of law, Katrina enjoys slow, long walks along the seawall, warm latte in hand, thinking about the meaning of undefinable human existence. As a lawyer, she uses words precisely and directly. But in her poetry, words become something else entirely — amorphous, evaporating, an unknowable force all their own.