Louise Poulin's education and early professional formation took place in Ontario. Her undergraduate studies were in London, a city in southwestern Ontario where the University of Western Ontario has its campus, and her legal training was at Queen's University in Kingston, a city on the northeastern shore of Lake Ontario. Both institutions are part of the province's long-established university system, which shaped the path from undergraduate study to legal practice in Ontario.
Poulin studied at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, where she completed a Bachelor of Arts in 1982. Western was founded on March 7, 1878, by Bishop Isaac Hellmuth of the Anglican Diocese of Huron as The Western University of London, Ontario, and it incorporated Huron College, an Anglican theological school established in 1863. The institution became non-denominational in 1908 and was renamed the University of Western Ontario in 1923.
She then studied law at Queen's University at Kingston, receiving a Bachelor of Laws in 1986. Queen's had separated from the Presbyterian Church in 1912 and adopted its present name, and its law faculty opened in 1957 after the reorganization of legal education in Ontario in the mid-1950s. The faculty began with a first class of 25 students in September 1957, and in 1972 it created QUIC-LAW, a computerized legal research database.
Poulin was admitted to the bar in Ontario in 1988, the step that qualified her to practise law in the province.
Louise Poulin practised as a partner at Weir & Foulds, a law firm based in Toronto. The firm states that it was founded in 1860 and describes itself as one of Canada's oldest law firms. Its core practice areas are litigation, corporate, property and government law, and the firm counts fourteen federally appointed judges among its former partners.
The firm's history is tied to Toronto's development as an industrial centre of Ontario in the late nineteenth century. Its lawyers have worked on major Canadian mandates and landmark cases, and the firm has served clients across Ontario, Canada and abroad.
Poulin was admitted to the Ontario bar in 1988, and her professional practice in Ontario developed from that qualification.
