About the show
We're Heather and Cat. We're senior intellectual property lawyers in Minneapolis and Toronto. We've spent two decades each inside firms — building practices, leading teams, watching cultures arrive and dissolve like fronts moving across a continent.
The shorthand we kept coming back to was meteorological. Some leaders bring drought. Others bring storms that clear the air. A few — the ones we wanted to interview — somehow made the climate around them habitable for ambitious work. They didn't talk about it. They just did it. And nobody quit.
So we made a show about that. Each week we sit down with someone who has changed the climate at work — a managing partner, a general counsel, a founder, a chief of staff — and we ask, in detail, what it cost them. The conversations are sharp. They're occasionally funny. They are not, under any circumstances, inspirational.
We're calling it Fource Majeure. The misspelling is on purpose. More on that below.
A note on the name
Force majeure is the legal doctrine that excuses you from a contract when the world breaks open — earthquakes, wars, the kind of trouble nobody thought to write down. Every lawyer knows it. We added a u. Partly for the lawyer joke. Partly because Heather has a degree in environmental sciences and the weather metaphor never quite leaves her. And partly because the extra letter is a quiet promise: someday, there will be four of us.
For now, there are two. That feels like enough.
Partner, Merchant & Gould — Minneapolis
Heather is an IP litigator with two decades of trial experience and a B.S. in Environmental Sciences from Iowa State. She thinks about firms the way she once thought about ecosystems: nothing thrives in a climate that doesn't suit it. She built a substantial trademark and unfair-competition practice while raising three kids and refusing, quietly and consistently, to play the game by anyone else's rules.
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Head of Trademarks & Copyright, Marks & Clerk — Toronto
Cat — never Catherine, except in court — leads a national trademark and copyright practice and has spent her career advising brands, broadcasters, and creators on the strategic edges of intellectual property. She writes, teaches, and chairs more committees than is strictly advisable. She believes that culture, like a brand, is what survives the people who built it.
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