Unfortunately, lawsuits are a part of doing business. During the life of a company, they will most likely be sued for something. To limit exposure, a business should take proactive measures to quell the chance of litigation.

One of the most harped upon tactics for limiting liability is to incorporate. This helps ensure that when a business is sued for whatever reason that the owner’s personal assets are less likely to be at stake. Incorporating is not cheap and is not for everyone, but can ultimately be worth it in the end.

Getting coverage. Insurance is another thing to consider. A solid policy is a necessary expense that will pay off down the road should you end up in court. Defense coverage can cover a part of or all legal expenses and settlements and is well worth the investment. It’s prudent to discuss different plans available with an agent. Find out what the deductable is, what the coverage entails and so on.

Is your merchandise dangerous? Take precautions with potentially hazardous merchandise. Encasing items that could inadvertently harm incautious patrons is a good idea. Require store personnel to assist customers with certain items.

Training for employees is essential. Some businesses rely on videos demonstrating the correct course of action or qualities they expect from their employees should a situation arise. Meetings to discuss issues like sexual harassment or general procedures help stave off potential lawsuits as well. Communication is key. The more detailed a picture a business owner can paint of what’s expected for her staff the better.

Retain a lawyer. Although there is no need for one right now, there will be. Having legal representation there for counsel shields business owners from others as well as themselves. In the book, Protecting Yourself from Business Lawsuits, Schweich states problems arise when a business owner preemptively sues someone in haste. “More often than not, the defendant becomes so infuriated at having been sued that it immediately escalates the matter… respond[ing] to the suit with a volley of costly and disruptive actions such as multiple pretrial motions, onerous requests for documents, lengthy interrogatories, and notices of deposition reaching all the way up to your CEO.” Taking a moment to discuss matters with an lawyer can help owners avoid such a legal morass.

There is no magic formula for 100% protection against lawsuits. Just last year, a securities broker sued a New York strip club, because he sustained “serious injuries” during a lap dance. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but ultimately the owner of Hot Lap Dance Club ended up being sued. Illustrating again how no one is immune from litigation- not even strip clubs.

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Recently, the Second Circuit Court in New York heard oral arguments concerning Rescuecom V. Google. If Rescuecom eventually wins, the case could have strong implications as to the future of trademark use.

Here’s what’s going on in language I can understand. Google makes its money by selling ads, just like television networks, radio shows, and other forms of media. Unlike this other media, Google sells ‘keywords’ or AdWords to sponsors so their site pops up when a user types in something specific. For example, if you search for ‘monkeys’ a link to PawsWeb.org displays on the far right with the header, “Adopt a Monkey”. PawsWeb.org ‘bought’ the keyword “monkeys” so that every time someone does a search for that term, their site displays. Whenever someone clicks their link, they pay Google some amount of money. Lawyerahead.ca generates vast of amount of traffic by purchasing keywords also. For example the keyword ‘Lawyer‘.  This is good for Google (revenue) and good for PawsWeb.org (increased monkey adoptions). But, what if you typed in something more specific, let’s say a company’s name and a link with that same company’s name (but not the company itself) appears in the top and side ad bars? Thinking it’s the actual company, you click on the link and are directed to some other company’s website.

That’s basically what the case is about. Rescuecom is suing Google because they auctioned the AdWord “Rescuecom” to someone. So whenever you searched (it doesn’t work anymore) for “Rescuecom” a link up top and a link on the side displayed that had nothing to do with the company, Rescuecom. This, as Rescuecom argues, creates confusion and infringes upon their trademark.

The case was dismissed years ago, but the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York decided the lower court was wrong to dismiss it. The panel claimed that, “If the searcher sees a different brand name as the top entry in response to the search for ‘Rescuecom,’ the searcher is likely to believe mistakenly that the different name which appears is affiliated with the brand name sought in the search.”

Oral arguments for the case are rather entertaining and can be viewed here.

In this article we will take a general look at some important things that every Canadian employer must remember regarding Employment Law and Employment Lawyers. 

1. Employment contracts. A contract is an important document that regulates everything between you and your employee, be sure to have a good contract that is based on the latest labour laws. A good contract includes everything from all the important things like trade secrets to holidays and working hours. The better the contract, the less time you will spend in courts.

2. Discrimination. An employer cannot hire or fire employees on the basis of sex, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion or equivalent belief, or age. Employer Discrimination can not only lead to the employee hiring a lawyer for lawsuits from the employees, but can also create a bad image of your company. Of course this has nothing to do with hiring people who are below or above the legal working age.

3. Harassment. Most of the people are used to the word harassment along side the word sexual, but it is not always true. There are different types of harassment ant they can come from anywhere, not just from bosses or fellow workers, but also from customers and even suppliers. A good employer must ensure that the worker has no verbal or physical abuse on his working place. If not you can have a difficult lawsuit that will most probably have a bad ending for you. The number of lawyers filing harassment lawsuits for their clients in the last years is rapidly growing and at least one of them even resulted in a jail sentence.

4. Changing the terms of Employment. Modern business is a very fast changing thing and it needs fast solutions and changes. Some Employers think that they can change the terms of employment just after a prior notice, but that’s not true. Every change in terms must be made by a negotiated agreement, except if the contract allows making such changes or the changes lie outside the contract. Be sure to remember this point in the contract, because any illegal changes in the employment contract will lead to lawsuits against you.

5. Consulting. While the first employment contracts wire simple and had nothing about discrimination or human rights, today we have huge employment laws that regulate all the possible things concerning employment. It is a normal thing for a truly democratic society, but an ordinary employer will need month to understand all the details of the employment law. So don’t be afraid to contact some labour law specialists firm in case you need to understand some parts of the law or need a consultation for a trial.

6. The five things that were presented above were written based on the general Canada Labour Code and it works only for about 10% of all the Canadian workers. The rest of them is covered by provinces labour laws, so be sure to check out your local laws concerning employment. The can be fairly different in British Columbia and Quebec.

Deciding to file a negligence claim and hiring a personal injury lawyer is a difficult decision and to make it easier it is important to understand how the law looks at personal injury claims. The three parts of any negligence claim are: negligence, damage done by the negligence, and a casual connection between the negligence and the damage.

Negligence is not meeting the standard of care. For example, Susan was walking from her car to the grocery store. The sidewalk had iced over and she slipped and fell. The grocery store did not salt the sidewalk after it had iced over. This is not meeting the standard of care to its shoppers and negligence.
Damages are more loosely defined than negligence. Mental distress over the loss of pet has been used as an example of damages done. Physical injury, mental distress, or wide varieties of other factors that impede you from continuing with your life tend to be considered damages. In Susan’s case, after falling it was difficult for her to stand so she called in to her bartending job and they fired her.
The casual connection between the injury and the negligence is the last factor. This means that the negligence lead to the injury. In the slip and fall example, Susan called in to work because of her injured ankle. If her employer fired her because of this one-time call-in, the damages from losing her job have a casual connection to the negligence. Likewise, if Susan has performed poorly at her job for quite some time, making up excuses to miss work and leaving early, there is no casual connection between her slip and fall and the loss of her job, because it was going to happen anyway.

Once you understand the basic elements of a personal injury case, consult with a lawyer right away. Lawyers can explain the merits of your case and if your damages are “real” or frivolous and what you stand to gain from the lawsuit. If you feel you were injured due to negligence it is very important to proceed immediately. This will eliminate any potential for your case to be thrown out due to any time constrictions and ensure the events are fresh in your mind and the minds of any witnesses.

This business was overtaken from the McDonald brothers at an early stage and turned over into an industry with revenue counted in billions of dollars. It is not surprising that the environmentalists and freedom fighters have put the yellow clown right next to Adolph Hitler and Genghis Khan, as a modern icon of evil. Every huge industry has a number of weak points and there are always people who, with the help of the law, attack this industry. The goals are different sometimes it is about health and sometimes just about money.

McDonalds has its revenues not because they sell the best food or have the best service. Apart from a brilliant business mechanism behind the burgers, there are also some psychological ideas. McDonalds sells exactly the same burgers in every part of the world, if you are traveling a lot, and you are not very interested in national cuisine, this is food for you. The modern world is very fast and most people don’t want to waste additional time on thinking what food to take. It is one of the main advantages. The second advantage was that they were first to start and international fast food business and rapid development helps them to dominate the fast food business.

During its history McDonalds was attacked hundreds of times, if we take away the idiotic “spilled-coffee” lawsuit filed by lawyers, there are a number of lawsuits that are interesting for law professionals. The main battlefield of the McLawyers is the brand itself. Since the industry grew large the heads of the industry are watching for all the Mc uses in brands all over the world. If someone is using something similar to McDonalds a lawsuit immediately follows, in most cases a successful one. There were also a number of lawsuits filed by environmentalists’ lawyers and few labor workers cases against McDonalds, but they had not a very devastating effect.

In the early 2000s there was a wave of anti-fast food movies, the biggest of them were Fast-Food Nation and Super Size Me. One of the movies was Maxime, McDuff & McDo, made by Canadian director Magnus Isacsson. It had a more serious approach. It was about unionizing McDonalds personnel in one of the restaurants in Montreal, the attempt was not as successful as in the classic Norma Rae movie but it brought some additional public attention to the problem of fast-food workers rights. It is well known that work in McDonalds is based on very strict rules and the workers have not many rights and freedoms. Still almost no major lawsuits were filled by McDonalds worker’s lawyer, mostly because the job is one of the lowest paid jobs in the world.

In the whole history the only one who achieved a major victory on McDonalds was Burger King, this chain of fast foods effectively rose up opposed the red-yellow threat for many years and the key to their success was not in branding, lawsuits or in business model. The key was the burger; they just started to make better burgers.

There is a popular urban legend that the guy who played the famous Marlboro Man, the greatest icon of the tobacco industry, actually died of lung cancer. That’s not true; actually there were 13 different actors who portrayed the Marlboro Man, and only two of them David McLean and Wayne McLaren died of lung cancer. When these two cowboys were diagnosed, they immediately began anti-smoking activity, but this repentance was a bit too late and had not much effect. Not to mention the ridiculous lawsuits against the Philip Morris filled by the McLean family after Davids’ death. The lawsuits stated that McLean, a lifelong smoker, was forced to smoke during his work as Marlboro Man. This is just an example small battle between law and design in the Great War on tobacco advertising, where law is making much more serious moves than just advocating the healthy way of life.

Many years have passed since the beginning of the tobacco industry and even since the first articles that tied smoking and lung cancer together. Since that famous article published in 1956 the law immediately turned to the “Death Industry” and started banning the advertising of cigarettes. It is somehow similar to the Marlboro Men mentioned above; the governments began worrying only after the number of lung cancer deaths rose from 10 to 150 per one hundred thousand people. That actually helped a bit, since 1980^th the numbers of lung cancer cases have decreased and tobacco industry is slowly loosing its positions. Tobacco advertising today is banned in many countries. Right now Canada is one of the leading countries in providing the anti-smoking laws and caring about the health of their citizens. This can be clearly seen if you look at the main battle field of this war – the cigarette pack.

Starting from the 1970^th the health organizations demanded that a warning sign must be placed on a cigarette pack. The sign varies from country to country and everywhere the design agencies are fighting to make the sing less visible and less attractive. Canada has definitely the most serious warnings, like photos of various diseases caused by smoking. Especially when compared to Russia and some Arabic countries, where the warning is an unreadable sentence basically built in the pack design.

Today it finally seems that law has won and in few decades smoking advertising will take its place between pop art and pin-up girls in the history of design and advertising, but it is not true. The warning 18+ sign placed on places where you can buy cigarettes is the big future of tobacco advertising. Every smoker and everyone who wants to start smoking will be able to find cigarettes with the help of this warning sign that literally screams “Cigarettes!” Sad but true. Also in general this war lies very far away from the smokers. Most of the people admit that anti-smoking campaigns had no influence on their decision to start smoking; and their desire to quit smocking has mostly nothing to do with the anti-smoking laws. The laws do a good thing mostly for those who don’t want any smoking near them

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The hectic life style that we as human beings are witnessing today has never been seen before. People across the world are so engrossed in their works and ambitions that they many a times neglect their personal safety and well being. With busy life styles and tight schedules they often find themselves prone to injuries that otherwise could have been well avoided. Many times these injuries are self afflicted. But majority of times they are a result of somebody else’s negligence. If such is the case then you can easily claim the damages caused by the aggressor with the help of legal provisions that are provided, particularly in the country of Canada.

In Canada there is a special law called tort. The word tort refers to the legal right given to the person who has suffered injuries, to claim damages from the government authorities, some private authority, or the person who is responsible for the injury. The victim in this case an easily approach the Canadian personal injury law court for justice.

If a person has suffered damages in person, or property, or reputation or rights then all this is included in the terminology of personal injuries law. A few kinds of personal injuries include auto accidents, wrongful death, brain injuries, as well as medical malpractice. In all such cases the victim can have the recourse to the legal machinery of the Canadian Government. If at all there has been a personal injury then the victim can easily approach a personal injury lawyer who would assist him in every step of the legal proceedings. You can browse through various personal injury cases on lawyerahead.ca, post your own personal injury case and have experienced personal injury lawyers call you with their advice. The personal injury lawyer in Canada would make sure that you get the best in terms of justice and compensation

So today we’ve got a set of strange lawsuits that have, wonderfully in both cases, been decided against their respective plaintiffs. In the first, the lawyer for the Wyrd Sisters, a band from Winnipeg who sued Warner Brothers for trademark infringement (over the Harry Potter movies’ depiction of a band called the “Weird Sisters,”), tried to sue the judges who decided that case, claiming a vast conspiracy to fix the case against them. (Yes, really). The second’s a bit more pedestrian, I suppose, as it’s from Wayne Crookes, the Green Party campaign manager, who sued over… links. On internet sites. to unfavorable articles about him. (Suing people for things they didn’t write- brilliant! of course you were going to win that one).

So apparently the Wyrd sisters and their lawyer, Kimberly Townley-Smith, first sued Warner Brothers in 2005, to try to prevent the release of one of the Harry Potter movies, because it was a trademark infringement. (The books and movies feature a band, “The Weird Sisters,” that the Wyrd Sisters objected to as violating their trademark). So, after losing that first trademark infringement lawsuit, (where they not only asked for an injunction to prevent the film’s release, to have DVDs, CDs, video games, and all sorts of other Harry Potter related crud that mentioned the Weird Sisters destroyed, but for $40 million as well), they apparently became convinced that the courts were fixed against them. And that there was some large conspiracy, to have their case thrown out.

Their lawyer, Townley-Smith, accused the judges named in the second lawsuit of “conspiracy, skulduggery, lying, case-fixing and criminality.” Yeah, really. Well, this lawsuit’s been thrown out, and the judicial reaction to it has been (not unexpectedly, if you’ve got your brain on) incredibly unfriendly. Not only do judges enjoy judicial immunity, but it’s apparently really bad form for a lawyer to sue another member of the bar, and even worse to try and both represent a client and act as a witness for their case. They’ve called this second lawsuit “scurrilous” and chucked it out the door. They’ve also said that they think that Townley-Smith may, herself, be held responsible for all the legal fees involved in this, because of the gross misconduct on her part.

Wayne Crookes’s case (lord, what a name) is, somehow, more sane. Crookes sued the site p2pnet.net for posting links to American sites that were defamatory, and Crookes claimed that linking to such statements was the same as making them oneself, and was defamation. The judge, however, Justice Stephen Kelleher, from the B.C. Supreme Court, dismissed this lawsuit. He compared “hyperlinking” (to use the 90’s idiom) to footnoting or citing, which, in a sense, is kind of obvious.

This is also the sort of case that has these really obvious implications for the rest of the internet (to adopt the bloggy idiom). I mean, if you can’t link to stuff without worrying about getting sued for their content… well, that sort of just takes down the whole internet! (I mean, seriously, the Drudge Report would be gone. Just gone. I wouldn’t cry for Matt Drudge, though I’d certainly cry if we went down). The US already protects internet service providers from content that goes through their tubes, so this was our first sort of Canadian attempt at solving these problems. Well, it’s good to know the internet will survive for another day.

Omar Khadr, now twenty-one years old, and his lawyers have filed suit against Prime Minister Stephen Harper this August, demanding that the Prime Minister step in and request Khadr’s extradition to Canada. Khadr has been in American custody since 2002, when he was arrested in Afghanistan for killing an American soldier at age fifteen. Khadr has been in American custody since, primarily at the controversial Guantanamo Bay facility. Prime Minister Harper has not asked the Americans to extradite Khadr to Canada, where he would be subject to Canadian law.

Omar Khadr’s case is particularly interesting, not only since videos of him being interrogated by CSIS agents were released this past summer but because Khadr is the only inmate left in Guantanamo Bay from a Western nation, and because Khadr’s personal history classifies him as a child soldier. Omar Khadr’s upbringing was, indeed, particularly radical- his family moved to Pakistan when he was very young, and to a military training camp run by Osama Bin Laden when he was about ten.

It seems ridiculous, particularly considering Canada’s support for the Child Soldier Protocols, that Khadr is still in US Custody, in a prison that has been shown to use torture mechanisms devised by Communist opponents during the Korean War to extract false confessions from Prisoners of War. Child Soldiers, according to the protocols, are considered victims, since they are placed into combat before they are old enough to rationally choose to fight. Considering that Khadr was placed in training by his parents at such a young age, it seems ridiculous to consider him anything but a child soldier.

Child Soldiers can be rehabilitated and taught to function normally, peacefully, and safely in normal society. Children who were forced to work as soldiers in the Sierra Leone conflict have, in several cases, been rehabilitated. Treating children who have been forced to work as soldiers as adults, as conscious criminals, is deplorable.

It seems the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons agrees- in June they issued a report calling on Harper to demand Khadr’s extradition, so he could be tried under Canadian law. The suit against Harper is asking the courts to order the Prime Minister to petition for Khadr’s extradition, which Khadr’s attorneys feel is the government’s obligation to their citizen. Considering that every other Western Democracy has done the same for their citizens, it seems ridiculous that Canada should let the U.S. treat their own in such a terrible way.