Appellate Practice

Appeals before the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada: to overturn the decision that got it wrong, or to protect the one that got it right.

Scope of work

• Civil & criminal appeals
• NS Court of Appeal advocacy
• Leave applications & appeals to the SCC
• Federal Court of Appeal & Tax Court appeals
• Standard-of-review analysis
• Factums & written advocacy
• Judicial review of administrative decisions
• Preserving favourable judgments on appeal

Trial courts and lower appellate courts make countless decisions with real consequences for real lives. Sometimes those courts get it wrong: through a misinterpretation of the law, a misapplication of the law to the facts, or other error. And sometimes a good decision needs to be defended against an opponent’s appeal. Appellate work runs in both directions, and it is its own discipline.

The firm brings intensive experience to the filing and arguing of appeals across both the civil and criminal arenas, on issues that are frequently complex. Rigorous research is paired with a search for innovative, sensible ways to frame an appeal so that it lands, drawing the court’s attention both to the legal questions and to the way those questions are bound up with the facts of the case. The animating premise is simple: an appellate decision has real-life consequences for those it benefits or harms.

Appeals turn on a different question than trials do. Rather than re-litigating the facts, an appeal asks whether the decision below disclosed a reviewable error, and the answer depends heavily on the applicable standard of review. In civil appeals, that framework was set by the Supreme Court of Canada in Housen v. Nikolaisen; for the judicial review of administrative decisions, the governing analysis now flows from Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v. Vavilov. Identifying the standard, and writing to it, is where appeals are won and lost.

The firm appears before the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal and brings leave applications and appeals to the Supreme Court of Canada, as well as matters before the Federal Court of Appeal and on appeal from the Tax Court. At every level the centre of gravity is the same: a disciplined, persuasive factum and an argument crafted to make the court pay attention to what actually matters.