We provide businesses with reliable and affordable services related to Aboriginal Law.

We’ll help you develop approaches to consultation that are legally sound, practical, and fitted to your unique circumstances.

• Regulatory processes: environmental assessments, administrative tribunals, multi-stakeholder tables, tenuring, and permitting
• Multiple resource sectors, including: pipelines, oil and gas, mining, forestry, fisheries, renewable energy, cultural heritage, parks, recreation, tourism, access management, and guide-outfitting.
• Consultation services, including: process design, communication with Indigenous communities and Crown regulators, assessing strength of claim and adequacy of consultation
• Preparation of Impact Benefit Agreements (IBAs) and other accommodation arrangements

We provide business structuring services to Indigenous and non-Indigenous clients developing new economic relationships.

• Partnerships and limited partnerships
• Corporations, trusts, and joint ventures
• Impact benefit agreements (BAs) and Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs)

We’ll also prepare other business documents needed in the circumstances:

• Non-disclosure agreements and negotiation agreements
• Requests for proposals and invitations to quote
• Employment and training policies

We support investment into Indigenous communities by helping clients decipher the rules applicable to different types of Indigenous land tenures.  We can support you from the earliest stages of strategic planning through to negotiation and legal drafting.  

• Reserve lands, treaty lands, and other Indigenous lands
• Real estate, natural resource development, land codes, lending and borrowing
• Indian Act tax exemptions and other tax matters

The rule of law is foundational to the peace and prosperity of all Canadians.  We collaborate with other subject matter experts to offer a full range of Aboriginal litigation services to businesses in British Columbia. 

• Independent legal opinions on assertions of inherent Indigenous rights, Aboriginal rights, and Aboriginal title
• Strength of claim and consultation adequacy assessments
• Injunctions, judicial reviews, and civil claims
• Negotiation services attuned to Indigenous legal and cultural contexts

Our associate lawyer, Timothy Thielmann, has represented clients in a number of complex Aboriginal law cases and obtained successful outcomes before British Columbia’s Supreme Court and Court of Appeal.