Legal Expense Insurance

1. Employment Disputes
   • An employee is dismissed from work for being late and missing important meetings. As a result, she is fired. She commences a wrongful dismissal action alleging discrimination based on her sex and her hearing disability.
2. Legal Defence
   • A shopkeeper performed a citizen’s arrest on a shoplifter and was charged criminally. The trial alone would have cost him in the region of $10,000 a day.
   • An employee has been sued for allegedly failing to comply with privacy legislation. There is no reasonable prospects requirement for the Legal Defence cover and therefore even if a policyholder is guilty, our lawyers can help to mitigate fine, sentence etc.
3. Contract Disputes and debt recovery
   • The printing company a business employs has printed substandard product and is refusing to honour its quality commitment.
   • A customer is refusing to pay her invoices.
   • A client incorrectly alleges that a company did not provide all the services agreed upon and so has refused to pay his account.
4. Statutory Licence Protection
   • A restaurant inspector has cited a restaurant for serving an underage customer and has suspended its operating license.
   • The City suspends a bakery’s licence because it failed a Health and Safety inspection.
5. Property Protection
   • A neighbour is interfering with the operation of a business by repeatedly parking his vehicles on the property preventing customers from using the lot.
   • A sports club rents the second floor of a building. Noxious vapours from the cabinetmaker on the ground floor are turning members away and threatening the sports club’s livelihood.
6. Bodily Injury
   • An employee is injured in the course of carrying out her employment duties and there is no workers’ compensation scheme.
   • A sales representative of a company injures himself at a client’s premises while doing a presentation.
7. Tax Protection
   • A company has received a notice of tax audit.
   • CRA requires proof from a business of the GST they have paid in a past taxation year. Briefly, they want corroboration that the input credits are accurate.
   • The PST department would like to audit all the invoices of a company to confirm that the correct amount of PST was remitted back to the government.

Advice Examples

• A company’s CFO wants to know if she is in a conflict of interest.
• An office was robbed and confidential information was stolen. Does the company have to notify their clients?
• A business wants to terminate an employee. How do they do this and what are his/her rights in the matter?
• What is the relevance of a shareholder agreement?
• What kind of license does a company need to operate its business?
• Is it necessary to make provisional instalments for GST/PST/HST?
• Should a company hire someone as an employee or on a contractual basis?
• Can a landlord increase the rent without prior notice?