McCarthy Tétrault Co-Counsel: Business Law Quarterly
(Volume 1, Issue 3)
We are pleased to provide our readers with the third issue of McCarthy Tétrault Co-Counsel: Business Law Quarterly, our overview of important developments of interest to our business clients.
As we prepare each issue, general themes emerge simply by recording developments in different areas of the law. For example, in this issue, there are reports on two cases where the plaintiffs’ counsel sought (unsuccessfully in each instance) to have the court apply certain rules from the statutes governing business corporations by analogy to other areas of the law. The areas where these issues arose were securities law and lending law. You can find the commentaries on these cases on pages 7, and 24, respectively.
Plaintiffs’ counsel are clearly becoming more resourceful in marshalling arguments that (they hope) have some degree of plausibility. Although the courts to date have been unwilling to apply these corporate law principles outside of the sphere where they explicitly apply, it is entirely possible that, in a different case and on different facts, another court may well be persuaded to make that leap. Given that many current corporate law rules came from common law rules, which in turn arose from cases where plaintiffs’ counsel were urging greater protection for their clients, it would not be surprising to see developments that come from analogizing to existing corporate law rules.
Another trend we see relates to secondary market civil liability legislation. For example, our first issue had several articles on the Ontario legislation that had just come into force in that province. Now Alberta and Manitoba have each passed similar legislation, with B.C. looking to adopt rules in this area, but debating whether its approach should be similar to or different from that taken in other provinces. Once again, we have several articles examining different aspects of this developing area.
These articles are, of course, in addition to others that we hope you will find of interest. As always, we welcome your questions and comments.
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