Canadian Business Lawyers: You may be negligent if you don’t know that:
- stipulating a rate of interest of 2% per month without setting out the annual equivalent rate in most contracts will result in interest not being collectible at more than 5% per annum. See Section 4 of the Interest Act (Canada).
- providing that the interest rate in a mortgage will increase after default is not enforceable. See Section 8 of the Interest Act (Canada).
- providing that a fixed sum will be payable on default under a contract may not be enforceable if the sum is not a genuine pre-estimate of damages, even if you say that it is a genuine pre-estimate of damages.
- quite apart from the passing of recent Ontario legislation, non-competition clauses in employment contracts will rarely be enforceable, but non-solicitation clauses may be.
- if your client hires a contractor to write software, the contractor will own the copyright in the software and control the source code unless the agreement stipulates differently.
- when you deal with transfers of copyright, you have to address moral rights (or you don’t know what moral rights are.)
- when your client buys goods from an American supplier (or sells goods to an American customer), the United Nations Convention on the Sale of Goods will apply unless you exclude it (or you don’t know why you should care.)
- you should not take your legal advice from articles like this without doing the research to confirm everything yourself.