By David Harris-Lowe – Partner, Family Law
You may hear about lawyers talk to you about legal costs when a court action is started. This refers to two things – the amount you pay your lawyer for legal representation and also whether one litigant has to pay the other legal costs for the cost of…
Thomas Dart, Partner.
Around the world, in so many countries, we are witnessing the conflict which is created by the political party system. We pride ourselves on our democracy. Yet, many of us feel it is not working. No party seems to be able to fix the many problems currently facing us. Poverty, climate…
Barrie Hayes, Partner, Family Law
There is a marked difference in the legal approach to quantifying support claims when a support payor is living as opposed to after a support payor has died.
In situations where the support payor is living the Divorce Act determines child and spousal support for married support payors and…
Thomas Dart, Partner, Family Law
The Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters has published its report on Family Justice. This committee was convened at the invitation of the Chief Justice of Canada, the Honorable Beverly McLachlan and is chaired by Supreme Court Justice Thomas Cromwell. It addresses the concern…
I know better, I really do.
My children are both four years old and they are both signed up for gymnastics every Sunday morning. They love participating and I love watching them. What I don’t love is trying to get them ready and out the door on time. You’ve heard the expression, “It’s like herding…
Thomas Dart, Partner, Family Law.
Lawyers who are also mediators are almost schizophrenic. As advocates, they have to pretend that they are, in effect, at war with the other side, a war which must be conducted with “civility”, but war nonetheless. As mediators, they have to find peace. So should family law be conducted…
A recent Court of Appeal decision has caused considerable concern in relation to the certainty of the statutory provisions being applied to determine net family property equalization between legal married spouses.
Sections 4 and 5 of the Family Law Act have, to date, been viewed as all encompassing statutory direction in the division of net…
This week, let me digress a bit from the family law field, although I think this topic is directly related to the issues we mediators face on a daily basis. If any of you have watched the Rick Mercer report on CBC television, you are undoubtedly a fan of his “weekly rant” in which he…
30 years ago, on a blustery spring day in Ottawa, then Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Queen Elizabeth executed a document proclaiming the patriation of the Constitution and the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The patriation of the Constitution, as Trudeau said in his remarks that day, marked the arrival…
In my previous blog on the high cost of lawyers in family matters, I promised to lay out a couple of additional ways in which fees can be reduced.
A lot of time is taken up in gathering the necessary information for your lawyer so that he or she can…
