Show Me the Money: Legal Fees Explained

Legal Fees ExplainedSo you’ve decided that you’d like to hire an employment/labour law firm. What about legal fees? You’ve seen the ads on TV and online where lawyers promise not to take a cut of anything until you win. Other lawyers’ services seem to cost an arm and a leg. How do you navigate the world of legal fees? This can be tricky, so below we’ve outlined some of the most common fee structures for employment lawyers.

Hourly Rate

This is one of the most popular fee structures used by employment lawyers. The lawyer charges an hourly rate for their time, and the client pays for the actual time spent working on the case. Basically, the lawyer will track every minute (or even every six minutes, to be exact) they spend on your case, and they’ll charge you for that time. That means if they spend 18 minutes on the phone with you, they’re gonna bill you for 0.3 hours.

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4 Common Mistakes to Avoid with Fixed-Term Contracts

4 Common Mistakes to Avoid with Fixed-Term ContractsFixed-term or temporary employment contracts can be a useful tool for short-term employment such as temporary replacements for employees on leave, co-op students or employees performing work funded by a time-limited grant. When drafted and executed correctly, employment ends at the end of the fixed-term contract and no further termination entitlements are owed. 

However, when fixed-term contracts are misused, they can become very risky for employers. Below are four mistakes for employers to avoid when hiring on a fixed-term contract.

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An Employer’s Guide to Managing Employees with Progressive Discipline

An Employer’s Guide to Managing Employees with Progressive DisciplineIf you’re an employer, you know that, whether you have 10 employees or 100, there is an art to managing your workforce and a well-oiled human resource process is necessary for a well-run business. You invest a lot of time and money into your employees and, understandably, expect attendance, productivity, and proper work conduct in return that will benefit your business as a whole. 

If you have employees who aren’t meeting the expectations of their role, it’s important not to have a knee-jerk reaction. Instead, progressive discipline gives both the employer and employee the opportunity to get on the same page and provides the employee with a roadmap for improvement.

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Don’t Leave it to Luck: Update Employment Contracts Following Substantial Changes to the Job

Update Employment Contracts Following Substantial Changes to the JobWith St. Patrick’s Day having just passed, many of us start to bank on luck at this time of the year. While luck might get you to the end of the rainbow on some things, we wouldn’t recommend that you lean on luck when it comes to non-existent, outdated or incomplete employment contracts. 

The Consequences of Leaving it up to Luck

First, in case you’re new here or need a quick refresher, employment contracts are often recommended by lawyers and adopted by employers to bring a level of certainty to the employment relationship. Employment contracts can achieve a variety of things but generally, they set out the responsibilities and expectations of the employee and employer. If the employment relationship is bound by provincial employment standards legislation (it usually is), then the contract has to, at the very least, uphold the minimum standards of the applicable legislation. 

If your employment contract runs afoul of the applicable employment standards legislation by failing to uphold the minimum standards as required by the law, your contract could be deemed unenforceable. Contracts could also be found to be unenforceable if they fail to comply with the principles of contract law. 

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Update on COVID-19 Layoff Provisions

COVID-19 Layoff ProvisionsThis past Monday marked the three-year anniversary of the date the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Since that fateful day in 2020, a lot has changed. Though there remain areas where transmission rates are still high, increased vaccination rates, higher immunity, and public health measures have helped curtail the spread of the virus and significantly decreased the rate of new infections in Canada. 

As a result, many provinces and territories are revoking laws that were amended or implemented as a result of the virus. For example, about a month ago, Alberta repealed the COVID-19 layoff provisions in its Employment Standards Code (the “ESC”). This followed a trend we saw with the federal government as well as many other provinces such as Ontario. 

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