Legal
Help With A Difference
Effective, Efficient and Compassionate Advocacy
Services We Offer
Our
single goal is to obtain the best possible result for you
at a reasonable cost. While no one can guarantee success,
we take pride in accepting difficult cases, putting forth
the best arguments we can craft, and doing our utmost to
show the courts that your position is the proper one. We
have acted in hundreds of cases, and appear in the Provincial
Court, the Supreme Court, and the Court of Appeal.
While
we can provide services in almost any area of law, we prefer
to provide services primarily in certain areas. These are:
Divorce, Child Custody and Access, Spousal and Child Support,
Division of Assets, Protection from Abuse.
We
can help you:
With
child custody or access for grandparents and other family
members as well as parents;
Obtain
support for yourself and/or your children;
Divide
family assets such as real estate, family businesses, RRSP's,
pensions, investments and other property, no matter in whose
name they are;
Have
your spouse removed from the family home, and obtain sole
use of it for yourself;
Obtain
an Order keeping your spouse away from you and/or your children,
or setting strict limits on the kind and frequency of contact
your spouse is permitted;
Divide
assets from a common-law relationship, even if the assets
are not in your name;
Obtain
a Paternity Order and get support from your child's father;
Obtain
support from your adult children if you are a parent in
need;
Deal
with questions of an infirm or elderly relative's care and
management of his/her estate.
Your
case will begin with us interviewing you at length so
we know the history of the relationship; to keep costs
as low as possible, we ask you to provide us with a written
report setting out the circumstances of your case, with
dates, times, names, and as much detail as possible. Remember
you know more about your case than we do, so the more
detail the better. We need to know how you and your spouse
divided child care and household responsibilities, how
much each of you worked outside the home, and the dates
each of you did so, what you earned, and what financial
arrangements you had, what assets each of you brought
into the relationship, and what assets were acquired after
the relationship began. We will give you a financial worksheet
to complete, from which we can prepare a Property and
Financial Statement - a document that the Court requires
at the outset.
Only
about 10% of cases actually go to trial; the vast majority
are settled by negotiation. We do however obtain a trial
date "just in case"; if your case cannot be settled, at
least there is a trial date, which means the end is in
sight.
We
will not try to explain the whole process here: it is
complex, and more easily explained in person.
Divorce/Separation
is such a final step, with such an impact on children,
that the Federal Government has made it a legal requirement
that lawyers advise you to make every effort to reconcile.
Lawyers can only be of limited assistance because we are
not trained counsellors. We take this responsibility very
seriously, and have a Professional Registered
Clinical Counsellor in our office.
We
act to collect adequate compensation for injuries suffered
in:
Car
Accidents
Falls
in stores, on slippery floors, on sidewalks and stairs,
parking lots, and any other places where a dangerous situation
causes someone to fall and suffer injury
Pedestrians/Car
accidents
Bicyclists/Car
crashes
Aircraft
Crashes
Sexual
Assaults"
Assaults
- such as being attacked and beaten
We
can act for injuries sufferd in any part of British Columbia,
and in many cases can also act when the injury occurred
outside British Columbia. The law allows many claims,
where the injury occurred outside British Columbia, to
be dealt with in the Province, and where it does not,
we can help with the case in the locality where it did
occur.
We
don't bank our reputation on promising you a large award
of money for your injuries; many lawyers promise that they
can, but the truth is that the size of the award is almost
entirely dependant on the severity of the injury. Any competent
lawyer can obtain a large award for a catastrophic injury;
what we can do in addition is to act actively and efficiently,
and compassionately using our skill to your best advantage
to obtain the award that is proper in your case.
Civil
Litigation Return
to the top
We
act for people who have been wronged through:
Breaches of their privacy
Trespass
- such as someone trespassing on their land and causing
damage, such as wrongfully cutting trees or interfering
with view
Wrongful
Dismissal - where someone has had his or her job terminated
without cause and without proper compensation or where
someone has quit their job because they have been forced
out due to harrassement or a poisonous atmosphere.
We
act for people who have been sexually assaulted; such assaults
can range from unwelcome and harassing sexual comments or
innuendos, or uninvited physical touching to coerced or
violent contact. Although there are many scenarios when
such assaults can occur, common situations arise when a
child is the target of a teacher's inappropriate attention
or the child is assaulted by a relative or friend of the
family. There is no time limit within which you must claim
compensation, so when the assault has occurred even years
in the past, we can assist.
Our
Clinical Counsellor is of especial assistance in dealing
with sexual assaults; please see more about how she can
assist by following the link to About
Counselling.
Our
assistance to creditors concentrates on assisting corporate
clients, such as banks and suppliers of goods trans-nationally,
in collecting debts owed by British Columbia debtors.
We do not restrict our practice to any specific part of
the Province of British Columbia, and act on behalf of
corporate creditors anywhere in the Province.
