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150+ Free Legal Resources for Start-ups

Ivan Law , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This is a giant list of 150+ free legal and law-related resources for Canadian start-ups and entrepreneurs. Look below for links to free business law guides, contract templates, student-run business law clinics, as well as online information boards. If you notice a link missing, please contact me here.

Giant list of free legal templates and resources for Canadian startups and entrepreneurs
There are tons of free law-related templates, guides, and information sources for Canadian start-ups online.

Free business law guides

These guides outline general information for businesses in Canada, written by some of the largest Canadian law firms. Some tend to be quite lengthy, but they’re a good primer on issues that may affect your business.

Canada

Alberta

  • Blakes, “Overview of Environmental Regulatory Regime Related to Alberta Oil Sands Activities”
  • Lawson Lundell, “Doing Business in Western Canada”

British Columbia

  • Blakes:
    • “Blakes 20th Annual Overview of Environmental Law and Regulation in British Columbia 2015”
    • “Overview of the Permitting Requirements for LNG Projects in British Columbia”
  • BC Small Business Accelerator Guides (112 guides in total)
  • Lawson Lundell, “Doing Business in Western Canada”
  • Mike Volker, “Starting a Business”

Manitoba

New Brunswick

  •   Cox & Palmer, “Guide to Doing Business in New Brunswick”

Newfoundland & Labrador

  • CFIB, Hiring Your First Employee
  • Department of Innovation, Steps to Starting a Small Business

Northwest Territories

Nova Scotia

Nunavut

  • Nunavut Business Guide, “Seven Steps to Help You Start Your Business”

Ontario

  • Canada Business Ontario, “Business Start-up Guide“
  • Employment Law Manual: “a brief overview of employment law and the laws of wrongful dismissal”
  • Law Help Ontario: Guides on starting, defending, and ending claims in the Ontario Superior Court
  • Represent Yourself in Ontario Small Claims Court: “information and tips for people who are representing themselves in small claims court.”

Prince Edward Island (PEI)

Quebec

  • Blakes, “Doing Business in Quebec”

Yukon

  • Government of Yukon, “Business Resources”

Free contract templates

Few lawyers draft contracts from scratch; contract templates can provide a helpful framework to build off of. However, you should not use these templates without speaking to a lawyer. Templates may not cover your business’s specific situation. Use them with discretion.

Canada

Ontario

Business law clinics for start-ups

If you’re a student or starting a new business with minimal revenue, you may qualify for free legal advice at a student clinic. These are some business-focused legal aid clinics started by law faculties across Canada.

Canada

  • Connect Legal: “advice for immigrant entrepreneurs”

Alberta

British Columbia

Manitoba

Nova Scotia

Ontario

  • IP Osgoode Innovation Clinic (Toronto, ON) is a “needs-based innovation-to-market legal clinic operated in collaboration with Innovation York and Torys LLP”
  • Osgoode Venture Clinic: (Toronto, ON) “provides legal services to early stage entrepreneurial ventures in the financing and equity structuring stages of growth”
  • Queen’s Business Law Clinic (Kingston, ON): “helping entrepreneurs, small businesses and not-for-profit organizations “
  • Ryerson University’s Law & Business Clinic (Toronto, ON): “provides free legal services in a variety of business law matters to entrepreneurs and small businesses who cannot afford to retain a lawyer”
  • Ryerson Law Research Centre’s Legal Clinic (Toronto, ON): provides “advice and information to current Ryerson students (full-time, part-time and CE) and entrepreneurs currently hosted by the DMZ.”
  • University of Windsor’s Law Technology & Entrepreneurship Clinic (LTEC)
  • Western Business Law Clinic (London, ON): provides “small start-up businesses with pro bono legal counsel”

Quebec

Online legal Q&A, FAQ and information

Sometimes, you just need help understanding a single regulation or step in a proceeding. It may not seem like enough to talk to a lawyer about (although you still should if you can), so you can look for the answer online. What follows are a few online Q&A and FAQ boards that you may find helpful.

Canada

Alberta

  • Courtroom etiquette videos for unrepresented claimants
  • Law Central Alberta “linking Albertans to legal help”
  • Law FAQ’s, “a website of the Centre for Public Legal Education Alberta”

British Columbia

Manitoba

New Brunswick

Nova Scotia

  • Labour Standards: information on employment rules, employee recruitment, hiring foreign workers, and labour standards complaints.
  • Legal Information Society of Nova Scotia (LISNS)’s Question & Answer

Ontario

Quebec

Saskatchewan

  • PLEA, “Legal information for everyone”

Other free legal resources (not business-focused)

When it comes to legal issues beyond your business (like law suits, immigration, criminal, and landlord/tenant matters), check out the following low-cost resources across Canada.

Canada

Alberta

British Columbia

Manitoba

New Brunswick

Newfoundland & Labrador

Northwest Territories

  • Legal Aid (Yellowknife, NWT): “confidential legal services, advice, and representation by a lawyer for residents of the Northwest Territories who would be unable to afford these services.”

Nova Scotia

  • Dalhousie Legal Aid Service (Halifax, NS): provides “legal aid services for persons who would not otherwise be able to obtain legal advice for assistance.”
  • Legal Aid Nova Scotia: “delivers legal aid via a network of 16 community-based law offices as well as 3 sub-offices.”
  • Mi’kmaq Legal Support Network: “justice support system for Aboriginal people who are involved in the criminal justice system in Nova Scotia.”
  • Newcomers to Canada: free information about “criminal law, domestic violence law, family law, general law, human rights & immigration status”
  • reachAbility: Lawyer referral service for persons with disabilities.

Nunavut

  • Legal Services Board of Nunavut “responsible for providing legal services to financially eligible Nunavummiut in the areas of criminal, family and civil law.”

Ontario

Prince Edward Island

Quebec

  • Pro Bono Quebec: public interest cases, partnerships, duty counsel and information.

Saskatchewan

Yukon

The Innovative Advocate: Canada’s Legal Future

Ivan Education, Law , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The way legal services are delivered in Canada is changing.  Increased competition and a demand for lower prices has pressured law firms to slow hiring and deliver their services more efficiently.  After finishing my first year at Queen’s Law I started thinking about how law students can help firms meet the demand.  It starts with an open-eyes look at where our industry is moving.

Lawyer blended with a computer and USB port

The reality is that corporate in-house clients are demanding routine process work be done for less, putting pressure on law firms to deliver their services faster with less overhead.  2012 also marked the first year that non-lawyers are allowed to own law firms in the UK, dramatically expanding the capital available for those firms’ investment and growth.

Here at home, lawyer-only firm ownership still reigns in Canada, but mergers with international players push our largest firms into ever-greater levels of competition.  Lawyers-turned-entrepreneurs in Canada are in turn growing their shares in the consumer market by launching online legal services.

New entrants to the market still haven’t quenched the demand for lower legal costs. Canadians face serious access to justice issues, and even middle-class litigants find themselves increasingly forced to represent themselves in court.

How are law students responding to these challenges?  Traditional not-for-profit work in legal clinics like Queen’s Legal Aid and Pro-Bono Students Canada is popular while in law school, but how many students continue their pro-bono efforts post graduation?  How does this solve the problem for clients who aren’t poor but still can’t afford legal advice?

I believe the change starts with how legal services are delivered.  I believe it starts by getting students thinking about innovative ways to bring the law to Canadians.

Law-students for Technology and Innovation (LFTI) is a student-run organization Nikolas Sopow and I created this year at Queen’s Law.  We’re passionate about finding better ways to deliver legal services.  We’re law students, but we’re not afraid of the changes coming to the Canadian legal scene.  Within three weeks we recruited four more executives to our team, and we’re still growing.  By 2015 we plan to have LFTI clubs at every law school in Canada.

Our projects this year are as diverse as our leadership team.  We’re hosting a speakers’ panel in Winter 2013 titled Technology on the Legal Frontier: Current and Future Ways to Practice Law.  We’re fundraising for computer literacy skills in Kingston by hosting a LAN party for video-game enthusiasts.  We’re blogging on the latest legal tech to hit app store shelves.  And we’re letting everyone know how the delivery of legal services is changing, so our classmates are prepared when they graduate.

Needless to say I’m excited at what LFTI has set out to accomplish this year.  Being prepared for the changing legal environment in Canada is about more than making a living as a lawyer.  It’s about making legal counsel affordable, providing greater access to justice, and ensuring Canadian firms remain competitive in the global market for legal services.

What areas of legal service delivery do you think could be improved?  How does legal education need to change in order to keep up?  Be creative, and ask tough questions. The innovative advocate is Canada’s legal future.

  • Ivan

Note that this article was published concurrently on LawIsCool.com

Start Up or Join Up?

Ivan Business Development , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Recent graduates from post-secondary schools across Canada have an interesting choice to make: should they start up a new enterprise or accept an offer to join an established one?

The student start-up dream has been immortalized by wild success stories.  Legends abound of university drop-outs like Mike Lazaridis (creator of the BlackBerry) and Bill Gates, as well as graduates like Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerburg – all students who left university to pursue technology start-ups that changed the world.

Intelligent and creative students across the country are faced with a choice when they graduate.  They may have innovative and ambitious ideas for new businesses, but are inundated with offers from businesses that need the best and brightest new graduates to survive. When faced with the choice between working for an established enterprise like Research In Motion (RIM), Google or Facebook, and starting their own venture, how should a student decide?

The price of failure – risk – is often the largest deterrent for anyone considering an entrepreneurial venture.  Students who finance their education with student loans (about 26% of Canadian students according to StatsCan – I think it’s closer to 50%) might have no choice but to accept an offer of steady income that helps pay down their debt.  Even for those rare few students that manage to graduate debt-free, sometimes a steady paycheque is too tempting to resist.  When you graduated university/college, wasn’t money your largest concern?

Students might also be concerned about missing the opportunities for networking, training and resume building that a large enterprise might offer them.  There’s no doubt about it, yesterday’s start-ups are now large firms with fixed budgets that have attractive perks for new hires.  The trade-offs are similar to the differences between working for a small company vs. big company – only with added risk and potential reward. So what’s stopping young entrepreneurs from getting hired?

A new wave of student organizations have started promoting youth entrepreneurship, encouraging students in high school, college and university to pursue their innovative ideas. Impact, UBC’s Enterprize Canada and EPIC Tech are three examples of student run not for profit organizations that are fostering a new community of student entrepreneurs that aren’t afraid to innovate.  These organizations are supported by venture capital and consulting firms looking to foster a new generation of clientele, as well as government agencies that (like the rest of us) would like to see more jobs created on Canadian soil.

Universities are catching on.

The University of Waterloo has created an entrepreneurship-based student residence called VeloCity, where students form teams that develop actual mobile media businesses over the course of the academic year.   This business community holds seminars and information sessions about starting a successful venture, and acts as a gateway into venture support networks in the wider community, like the Accelerator Centre.  This is a trend that is sure to continue.

Now when asked the question, “start up or join up” what would you do?