Commercial Litigation and Dispute Resolution Blog

A relatively recent decision from the BC Court of Appeal will shield defendants from potential exposure to special costs orders, even if they end up losing the litigation.  The decision creates an uneven playing field, where in certain types of litigation, successful defendants will recover special costs but successful plaintiffs will not.  Plaintiffs’ counsel will ...

Fraudsters are very clever. Many set up elaborate commercial transactions for the purpose of absconding with someone else's money.  By the time the scheme is discovered, an innocent victim is usually out of pocket, often for large sums of money. In an effort to recover that loss, the victim often turns to other innocent parties who were unknowingly involved in the deal and ...

This is a vexing question. It generally arises when a rogue has made off with money or assets having perpetrated a fraud and has left behind two or more equally innocent victims. As between those victims, who should bear the loss?

Earlier this week, the Alberta Court of Appeal weighed in on just such a case. The short answer is that the court will look to the statutory rights of the ...

This post was submitted by Lawson Lundell guest author Euan Sinclair, Director, Knowledge Management.

The titanic legal battle over the soul of Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act took a new twist recently, when the Supreme Court of Canada refused the Alberta Information and Privacy Commissioner’s application for leave to appeal the Alberta Court of ...

A common fraud perpetrated on financial institutions is the deposit of counterfeit cheques.  The account holder distances themselves from the fraud by portraying the payment as one they thought was part of a legitimate transaction.  The funds are often withdrawn or transferred before the cheque is returned as counterfeit, usually within a matter of days.  After the ...

On July 23^rd, ex-Fifa presidential candidate, Mohammad Bin Hammam (“MBH”) was banned from football related activity for life.  He is the most senior official to be banned by Fifa in its 107 year history.  For the uninitiated, Fifa is the governing global body for the sport of soccer.  A brief factoid:  Fifa has more members (208) than the International Olympic Committee; is ...

There is a card in Monopoly that reads “Bank error in your favour” and which entitles you to keep the $200 wrongly credited to your account.   Banks can make errors.  Banks are also frequently the victims of fraud.  The result of this is often that a lucky customer’s account suddenly has a much larger balance.  However, unlike Monopoly, when this occurs, the bank will do all it ...

This post was submitted by Lawson Lundell guest author Euan Sinclair, Director, Knowledge Management.

In the absence of a national identity card, many Canadians are routinely required to use their driving licences to prove their identity in the course of business, commerce or travel. But when is it lawful for organizations to record information from the licence to ...

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 ...