Commercial Litigation and Dispute Resolution Blog

At my in-laws recently, a rather overbearing friend of theirs was expounding to the gathered on the evils of banks and their obligations to provide anyone who wants one with a bank account.  Among other erroneous information, he opined that the right to have a bank account was inalienable and could not be denied by any financial institution.

Though it was not worth saying so at ...

What is civil contempt of court? A fair question given the Ontario Court of Appeal's recent decision to uphold a 14 month sentence for civil contempt in the case of Barry Landen. Mr. Landen had defrauded the estate of his good friend Paul Penni of millions of dollars. This 14 month sentence arose not from the crime Landen committed (for which to date he has served only a 45 day ...

Almost the only member of the press to notice, Julius Melnitzer recently reported an Ontario Court of Appeal decision that held the Royal Bank of Canada had no right to freeze accounts belonging to one of its customers by simply starting a lawsuit.  The case turned on the application of a little known (but much loved by litigators) section of the Bank Act: section 437(2).  This ...

In an intersection of law and Canadian pop-culture, k.d. lang successfully defended her California judgment against her ex-manager, Annabel Lapp.  Lapp, a Canadian resident, had been k.d.’s manager for 16 years prior to November 2005.  Matters became nasty when k.d. sued Lapp in California for fraudulently handling her finances.  k.d. effectively obtained a default ...

In a pair of companion cases, the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously turned down an opportunity to patch over a priority lacuna in the federal Bank Act, S.C. 1991, c. 46 and, instead, held such security could rank after unregistered security granted under Saskatchewan’s Personal Property Security Act, S.S. 1993, c. P-6.2.  In doing so, the Court (quite rightly) rejected a ...

No day goes by without some new internet peril being drawn to our attention.  The most recent evil is an internet based program called Firesheep.   Like others (i.e. Wireshark, Tshark, Snort, Nmap, etc.), this program, a free download on the internet, allows users to troll cyberspace for open WiFi networks and, by doing so, access personal data and communications.  The danger in ...

You just discovered that one of your company’s directors or a senior employee has been engaging in a fraud.  One of the first things I get asked in situations like this is whether the conduct of the employee/director will be treated as the conduct of the company generally.  Can the company distance itself from its agent’s conduct?  It matters for a variety of reasons ...