Our Take On Things
When a Court Decision Spawns Law Suits
Today I was reading the most recent Ontario Reports – the weekly digest every Ontario lawyer receives that includes some recent decisions of the Courts. I read with interest the summary of a case involving a lawsuit by a client against an Insurance Company and an...
Logos
There’s an interesting article in Huh Magazine about the costs of a few widely-known logos. Seeing the low price paid for some of the more iconic ones is a good reminder of how much value can be put into branding at the early stages of a business’ development by being...
Out of Office
During the summer months, with people on vacation or otherwise disinclined to come into the office, we face a variety of questions in the area of employment law. One issue that keeps coming up is that of smartphone use. We’ve dealt with privacy and security issues as...
Trustees
Recently we’ve had a lot of questions about trustees – both in the context of the estate (formerly called the executor/executrix) and in inter vivos trust situations. Generally speaking, the trustee is the person tasked with administering the trust according to the...
Moving
It’s summertime and a lot of businesses (particularly smaller ones) take this time of year to slow down a little; senior staff like to take some well-deserved time off, people are generally harder to get ahold of, and this is the time that a lot of reorganization work...
Log Off
An interesting decision was released last week by the Superior Court of New Jersey, a US state-level appeal court. According to the facts of the case, the defendant had accessed a co-worker’s Yahoo e-mail account from a computer lab terminal, which the plaintiff had...
An Important Victory for Creditors
Our firm recently was successful in arguing against the appeal of a decision that granted our client Judgment against the officers & directors of a company we had obtained a previous Judgment against, as well as all the other corporations they were using to carry on...
Policies and Procedures
Every once in a while we are lucky enough to get to work on the holy grail of a client’s operations – the policies and procedures manual. Sometimes it’s after our business compliance audit turns up some unexpected sources of liability, sometimes it’s after some...
Facebook: What were you thinking?
How the mighty has fallen – or at least received its comeuppance. By now, you will have heard of this public relations and legal disaster, also known as the Facebook IPO. The great gatherer of personal information and annoying games (which thankfully no longer remind...
We know what we're doing
Do you (without looking it up) know the percentage of your income that you would be required to pay as child support if you found yourself in a situation that you have to support a child? Neither do I and that’s a good thing, both from a personal perspective and a...
ILA
Amidst all the Facebook IPO hype this week, there was the release of an e-mail from Mark Zuckerberg to his corporate lawyer, instructing them to dilute Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s share in the burgeoning company. Aside from the obvious professional...
The Civil Law System in Ontario is breaking/broken – but no one is noticing
The news this week has been of health care cuts and reductions in spending in that sector – there is good reason for that. The average person needs health care and it impacts on them directly. Cuts can seep into government over time and produce a global result of...
Social Media Won'ts
I am reading more and more lately about the idea of putting together a Will for your social media accounts. Some are advising that you elect a trustee who will delete or otherwise take care of your twitterbookspaces after you shuffle off of this mortal coil, and...
The Buffet "Rule" on Due Diligence
I was watching a documentary about Warren Buffet the other day and at one point they were reviewing the details of one of his more recent financial deals. They noted that in his purchase of some multimillion dollar business or other, he did not retain legal counsel to...
Making law school less stressful ?
I was sure it was a late April Fool's joke when I heard the news yesterday that UofT law school is considering changing its marking system to a less stressful one. Even crazier was the yoga, dog petting & foot massages that the students were receiving on the eve of...
Use it or Lose it™
So you’ve gone to all the time and expense of developing a brand, establishing goodwill in the marketplace and even registering your trade-mark – now what? Just like the title says, use it or lose it. The rights and responsibilities that come along with trade-mark...
Lessons from the Den
The sixth season of CBC’s Dragons’ Den came to an end last week ( www.cbc.ca/dragonsden/) and I will confess to being a big fan. The show is not just entertaining (who doesn’t love Mr. Wonderful & his “money is the only thing of value attitude” … unless he’s on his...
The Business of Brothels
Well, yesterday’s Ontario Court of Appeal decision certainly has generated a lot of discussion. You know, the one where Brothels are now legal, well they will be in a year if the Supreme Court of Canada doesn’t disagree. In our office the talk was not of the morality...
Summer Workers
It’s summertime (not really) and our thoughts naturally turn (again not really) to summer students, interns and other temporary employees. Some of these indentured servants, er, temporary workers, will return to their studies in the fall, some will wander off to other...
Joint and Several Liability in Contracting
We’ve touched on the area of guarantors before – those parties who literally guarantee the performance of some aspect of a legal agreement – and the exposure to liability that a guarantor can have in the event of a default or breach of the agreement. But I don’t think...
Disclosure of Confidential Information in Litigation
Inga and I came across an interesting development recently that has me thinking. In the course of reviewing a statement of claim, we noted that the particulars disclosed various confidential clauses of an agreement that clients of ours had recently entered into. That...