141: What Canadian Business Owners Need to Know About Their Contracts with Courtney Yaremchuk, J.D.

The Legal Paige® Podcast

Have you heard the exciting news?! The Legal Paige now has contracts available for Canadians! If you are a Canadian entrepreneur, TLP can now help you get legally legit.

In this episode of The Legal Paige podcast, I introduce the attorney we brought on board to help make Canadian Contracts come to life. Courtney is a Canadian lawyer with a general practice based in rural Saskatchewan. The bulk of her work as a lawyer is focused on corporate law, real estate, and wills and estate administration. She is a wife, mother to a new baby born early this year, and lives on a mixed grain and cattle farm!

The Canadian Catalog would NEVER have been able to happen without the help of our gal Courtney and I know you’ll enjoy this episode as we dive into all the important differences between Canadian and US law.

THE BIG DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE CANADIAN + US LEGAL SYSTEM

There are a lot of similarities in the US and Canadian legal system– but the biggest difference between our two country’s contracts lies in the boilerplate clauses. (Boilerplate clauses are those legal-language-heavy clauses that are found at the bottom of your contract). This is because the Canadian courts have been really clear about HOW they are going to interpret contract clauses when there is a dispute…so Canadians need to be especially careful with the wording to make sure the meaning is clear to everyone involved.

Another huge difference between the two jurisdictions is the type of damages that will be awarded. Canadian courts rarely offer high rewards for damages in any case- whether that’s a contract dispute or otherwise. The only way you’ll see a high reward is if there was malicious conduct or highly reprehensible behavior (which is rare and hard to prove). Canadian courts DO often offer awards on cost to the winning party– if you go to trial with somebody in a contract dispute and you win, the other party might be ordered to pay your legal costs up to that point. If you're going all the way to trial you are spending upwards of $50,000 in legal fees so it’s really important for Canadian business owners to be aware of that and to have their bases covered with strong legal contracts.

MORE FROM THIS EPISODE

Press play on Episode 141 listen as we dive deep into the nuances between Canadian and US law. You’ll learn how Canadians should approach Website Terms and Conditions, the differences between copyright law (i.e. the surprising person that actually owns a photograph in Canada), how Canadians should register their businesses, employment laws to be aware of, how the Canadian Courts have handled Covid and service based contracts like ours, and Courtney’s best tips for Canadian business owners.

The Legal Paige is so excited to now have Canadian Contracts available in the shop! Courtney has been a major piece in getting our Canadian Catalog set up and is working through converting all of our TLP Products to living Canadian documents. The biggest takeaway I have for Canadian entrepreneurs- and really all entrepreneurs- is that NOW is the time to get legally legit. Now is the time to get protected. Now is the time to not shove things under the rug to deal with on another day. Your contracts are so important for your business– they are living documents that shift and grow as your business changes and they set the tone in your working relationship with clients.