Becky Rynor talked to four business lawyers to get an idea of the trends to come in 2015, and what she heard was meditations on a theme: oversight. Clients are paying close attention to their invoices, and regulators are paying close attention to everything.

One of the sessions at the recent CBA Legal Conference in St. John's, N.L., explored the international and domestic crackdown on corrupt business practices. Here are some tips offered up during the session for recognizing and mitigating corrupt foreign practices.

Working online is often touted as the way of the future for lawyers, and it may well make much of what they do easier. But the worldwide web also holds hidden traps for the unsuspecting, as Ottawa lawyer David Ian Amber discovered. James Careless tells the cautionary tale.

With its June ruling in R. v. Spencer, the Supreme Court of Canada put a limit on the kind of information the police can obtain without a warrant from a person or organization. Jason Scott Alexander looks at what this decision means for individuals and organizations, as well as for the country's law enforcement agencies.

Employee stock option plans (“ESOPs”) have long represented a popular means for companies to attract, compensate, and retain key employees.

Sitting on a board can be a great way to gild your CV and add a little cash to your income stream. But caveat director (bad Latin intended) – it could also be an enormously frustrating waste of time and energy. Julie Sobowale offers up some tips for questions to ask before accepting invitations to sit on boards – not surprisingly, the more due diligence you do, the better.

The temporary foreign worker program is supposed to make thingseasier for employers. Instead, some employers' alleged abuse of the program is causing headaches for government and others who rely on the system to keep their businesses open. And then there are the lawyers, trying to keep track of policies that can change while they blink. Doug Beazley dips his toe in the quicksand that is the TFW program.

The Voluntary Disclosures Program (the “VDP”) is a broad-based program administered by the Canada Revenue Agency (the “CRA”) that is aimed at permitting taxpayers to disclose historically inaccurate or incomplete tax reporting under a variety of circumstances

One of the joys of practising in a big firm is that it’s someone else’s job to take care of the books. But the reality for many of today’s young and starting lawyers is that they’ll end up in solo practice — and there’s a growing sense that they’re going to need to know how to mind their own business, writes Becky Rynor.

Industry Canada has opened consultations on the Canada Business Corporations Act ahead of the legislation’s first real overhaul in 13 years. Janice and George Mucalov take us through some of the issues.