by Sandra Rubin

Lexpert®'s look at the most significant 2009 deals shows that Canada's resource sectors played major roles in several transactions. As a result of a dragging economy, successful refinancings, restructurings and plain old IPOs suddenly became events to be celebrated

Chinese companies went shopping in Canada's resource sectors last year. Of the 20 largest Canadian M&A deals in 2009, Chinese companies were the bidders on at least five, worth more than US$15 billion.

Experts say we should expect more of that in 2010. “Aside from the blockbuster deals in the oil and gas sector – Suncor/Petro-Can and Addax/Sinopec – deal activity in the mining sector rebounded beginning in the second quarter of 2009,” says John Nyholt, PricewaterhouseCoopers' National Transaction Services Leader. “Deal values are dramatically lower than the 2007 peak, but still in line with pre-peak averages. With continued strength in the gold market and solid recovery in base metal prices, mining companies have been busy raising capital in the latter half of 2009, so watch for some of that capital to go into more acquisition activity in 2010.”

The list of Chinese deals would start with Sinopec's US$8.8-billion acquisition of Addax Petroleum and PetroChina's stake in the Athabasca oil sands.

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by Julius Melnitzer

Lexpert®'s list of 2009's top business decisions offers up seven pro-business cases. Positive news includes the refusal to certify a major wage and overtime class action, a clampdown on business-method patents and the affirmation of the constitutionality of capping damages in motor vehicle accident cases

For the second year in a row, Canadian business has fared quite well in Canadian courts. Indeed, Lexpert®'s list of the top 10 business decisions of 2009 boasts seven cases that produced pro-business results.

We considered decisions from any level of court or tribunal between November 1, 2008, and October 31, 2009. In choosing our Top 10, we received submissions from a wide range of law firms and selected cases that, in our view, had the broadest impact on the business community.

One case that narrowly missed the Top 10 was Sharma v. Timminco Limited, decided on October 29, 2009, just before our deadline date. In his reasons, Justice Paul Perell of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice established some parameters for the participation of US firms on behalf of plaintiffs. He ruled that there was “nothing inherently wrong” with their participation in Canadian class actions as long as it did not interfere with the solicitor-client relationship between the Ontario lawyer of record and the client.

Some observers have suggested that the peripheral involvement of US lawyers could affect the value of claims and settlements. Ultimately, we concluded that no court had previously suggested that the expertise of US lawyers could not be engaged by their Canadian counterparts, and that Timminco did not constitute a departure from the status quo. Doubtless, the case will encourage more cross-border co-operation between plaintiffs' firms, and that makes it very significant — just not significant enough to edge into our Top 10.

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by Julius Melnitzer

Knowledge management today is more than a buzzword. It has evolved into a host of subspecies that engages the entire law-firm infrastructure — embracing the practice of law and business of law. But the question remains: how far are firms willing to go to integrate KM into their functions?

Statistics, it is said, are all about how you interpret them, which means they can be informative or misleading. So it is with a Google search of the Web results between 1990 and 2009 for the search term “knowledge-management law firm.”

The graph that emerges from the search reveals that “knowledge-management law firm” yielded few results until 1996. Between 1996 and 1999, the number of results grew dramatically and kept rising until they peaked in 2003. For the six years since, however, the search term shows a steady year-over-year decline, falling to 1998 levels by 2009.

Cynics might say that law firms have lost interest in knowledge management (KM), while optimists would counter that KM at law firms has become so ingrained that it's no longer a flavour-of-the-day buzzword. “To me, the search results demonstrate that the term – though perhaps not the need or the projects aimed at that need – is yesterday's news,” says Simon Chester of Heenan Blaikie LLP. “The new term is ‘enterprise search,' which refers to the deployment of very powerful and very expensive products to drill down into documents and, if necessary, eliminate the irrelevant ones.”

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