Practice Profile
Education
Whether you’re dealing with academic appeals, enforcing contracts, purchasing land for further development or raising financing, Cassels Brock can help.
Cassels Brock has represented Canada’s largest university for over 70 years and has acted for several other major universities and community colleges. Our lawyers also have experience acting for school boards, private schools, an education commission and the Ministry of Education. In representing our clients in the education field, we have gained a great deal of in-depth knowledge of not only how those institutions operate, but also how to best approach the unique issues which they often face.
To meet our clients’ diverse legal needs, we draw on the expertise of our lawyers in our Business Law, Construction, Litigation, Labour & Employment, Municipal, Planning & Environmental, Real Estate, Securities and Tax & Trusts Groups. In representing our clients’ interests, we have appeared on their behalf at all levels of the Ontario and federal courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada and before administrative tribunals ranging from the Ontario Human Rights Commission to the Copyright Board of Canada.
Our Services:
Many of our lawyers have experience dealing with issues surrounding teacher appraisals, student suspensions and expulsions, copyright in on-line education, freedom of information and protection of privacy. We also represent our education clients in a number of other areas including:
- Negotiation, enforcement and interpretation of contracts including research contracts and donation agreements
- Governance issues and policy development
- Academic appeals and non-academic discipline
- Procurement including food and beverage services
- Relations with affiliated institutions including teaching hospitals
- Information technology, including purchase and licencing of computer hardware and software and data security
- Intellectual property, including copyright, trade-marks and patent issues
- Commercial leasing
- Acquisitions and disposition of property
- Development approvals
- Financing all aspects of development and construction
- Taxation and charity matters
- Reorganizations, amalgamations, affiliations and asset transfers
- Residential and commercial tenancy disputes
- Administrative proceedings and arbitrations
- Executive employment agreements and packages
- Labour relations, employment standards, wrongful dismissal, human rights and sexual harassment matters
Examples of some of our work in the area include:
- Acting for universities or the underwriters in raising hundreds of millions of dollars through debt financings for the universities
- Acting on behalf of a group of underwriters in connection with a refinancing of the debt of a school board trust
- Representing universities in Charter challenges, including a challenge to mandatory retirement (McKinney v. University of Guelph, [1990] 3 S.C.R. 299) and to interning requirements for medical practice in Ontario (Jamorski v. Ontario (A.G.) (1987) 59 O.R. (2nd) 422)
- Obtaining a Mareva injunction on behalf of a university that prevented an employee who had defrauded the university from disposing of assets pending a trial of the action
- Successfully opposing a motion to certify a class action against a university
- Successfully representing a university in the Court of Appeal on an application to terminate the tenancy of a student who had transferred occupancy of a unit without the university’s consent
- Providing construction advice to school boards and universities in their build programs
- Providing advice to a provincial education commission, which oversaw the transfer of assets and liabilities and the transfer of employees from the old to the new school boards. This included participation in drafting the directives, providing ongoing advice to members of the commission, assisting with the hearings, and appearing in court
- Successfully defended a university in several precedent-setting court cases upholding the integrity and independence of the university’s academic programs and internal procedures
- Successfully obtained an injunction on behalf of a university which prevented the unfair exclusion of its track team from the provincial finals