If you want to run your own case and speak for yourself at the hearing, we can assist you. You keep carriage of the matter and you stand up on the day. We build the parts that decide it: the issues, the law, the documents, and the questions you will ask. You choose which of those you want, task by task.
Take one item or several. Nothing here is a package you have to buy whole.
Most cases are lost before the hearing, in the framing. We work out what your matter actually turns on, reduce it to the two or three questions a decision-maker has to answer, and set aside everything that will not move the result.
Focused research into the legislation, regulations, rules of procedure and decisions that govern your question, delivered in writing, quoted and cited so you can verify every source and hand it up if you need to.
The decisions that help you and the decisions that hurt you, with what each one means for your facts, so you are not surprised by an authority the other side produces on the day.
The correct application, response or motion material for your forum, completed properly, with the filing and service steps and deadlines set out so nothing is missed.
Notices prepared and timed correctly, and correspondence to the other side, an insurer, a landlord, an employer or a prosecutor, written to do a job rather than to vent.
Affidavits drafted in your own voice, exhibits marked and ordered, a chronology of the key dates, and an evidence brief a decision-maker can follow without hunting.
A short, written opening that tells the decision-maker what the case is about, what you are asking for, and what you will prove, in the first two minutes when attention is highest.
Question plans for your own witnesses and for the other side's: what to ask, in what order, what to do with a document, and where to stop. Cross-examination goes wrong most often by carrying on one question too long.
A written closing that ties each fact you proved to the test that applies and to the remedy you want, so your last words to the decision-maker are the strongest ones you have.
Assistance is available for matters in the forums covered by our licence, including the Landlord and Tenant Board, Small Claims Court, the Licence Appeal Tribunal, provincial offences and traffic matters, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, WSIB and WSIAT, employment standards claims, ODSP and Ontario Works appeals, and Immigration and Refugee Board matters. Where your matter sits outside that scope, we say so and refer you, rather than preparing something we are not permitted to prepare.
Decision-makers do not hear the case you lived. They hear the case you present, in the time you are given, on the documents you filed. Two people with identical facts can walk out with opposite orders, and the difference is usually not eloquence. It is whether the issues were framed, whether the right authority was in front of the decision-maker, whether the documents were served in time and organized so they could be found, and whether the questions in cross-examination were planned or invented on the spot.
Those are the parts that reward preparation, and they are the parts most self-represented people never get to, because they spend their preparation time on the story rather than on the test that has to be met. Coming in with the law identified, the evidence ordered and the questions written is what turns a hearing from something that happens to you into something you can actually run.
There is a practical dimension as well. Representation at every step is not always necessary or proportionate to what is at stake. Where you are willing and able to speak for yourself, directing your budget to the parts of the case that decide it, the issues, the law and the questions, is often the better use of it. That is a decision about proportion, not about doing things cheaply, and it is one we will talk through honestly with you. Where a matter genuinely needs a representative on the record, we will tell you that too.
Complete the preparation intake with your forum, your dates and what has happened so far. The more precise the intake, the more useful the first conversation is.
We tell you which tasks are within our scope and our competence, which are not, and what we would prioritize if the budget is limited. If a matter needs a lawyer, you hear that at this stage, not later.
Each task is described, quoted and confirmed in writing before it begins, together with what you are responsible for and by when. Nothing is started on a task that has not been agreed.
You pay for the tasks you have agreed to, as you agree to them. There is no retainer to fund and no open-ended account. Add a further task at any point, or stop after one.
Complete the preparation intake and you will hear which tasks would help most in your matter, what each involves, and what each costs, before anything begins.
