White Collar Litigation

Defence and strategic response for corporations and individuals caught up in regulatory investigations and financial-crime allegations, where engaging counsel early changes everything.

Scope of work

• Fraud & breach-of-trust allegations
• Securities enforcement & investigations
• Money laundering & proceeds of crime
• Bribery, secret commissions & corruption
• Competition Act offences
• Foreign bribery (CFPOA) matters
• Regulatory & administrative investigations
• Internal investigations & compliance

“White collar” is shorthand for offences committed for financial gain, and it is a broad category indeed. It does not require a notorious fraudster at the centre of the story. Professionals of every kind, among them physicians, lawyers, bank and mortgage managers, business owners, and online entrepreneurs, can and do find themselves drawn into civil and criminal proceedings, often arising from conduct they did not understand to be unlawful.

Investigations of financial crime can take years and turn on enormous volumes of documents. Individuals and companies under examination are typically the subject of inquiries and communications from regulators and investigators, and those contacts are, more often than not, a signal that the recipient is already under suspicion. This is why retaining counsel immediately is critical. The early mistakes, a misremembered detail, a miscommunication with an investigator, or an answer that is later read as a misrepresentation, are the ones that cause lasting harm, and they are almost always made before a lawyer is involved.

In Canada, the relevant frameworks span the criminal and the regulatory. Fraud and breach of trust are prosecuted under the Criminal Code; securities misconduct is pursued by provincial securities regulators; money laundering and terrorist-financing obligations flow from the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act and its regulator, FINTRAC; anti-competitive conduct from the Competition Act; and the bribery of foreign officials from the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act. For matters that cross into the United States, the firm’s dual-jurisdiction capability allows it to coordinate with the parallel American regimes rather than treat them as someone else’s problem.

The firm has the training and experience to help clients investigate the conduct in question, prepare an effective defence, and respond to regulators with discipline. Where appropriate, we conduct privileged internal investigations and build compliance measures designed to resolve a problem and prevent the next one. These are demanding files; they call for a steady, experienced hand.