Toronto Appeal Lawyer

What an Appellate Lawyer Actually Does

Appellate work is a different discipline from trial work. The record is closed, the witnesses do not return, and the appellate panel decides on the basis of three things: the transcripts, the factum, and a short period of oral argument. The lawyer who can rebuild a 9-day trial into a 30-page factum that frames a clean question of law is the lawyer who wins the appeal.

Our firm runs both ends of the litigation pipeline. Many appellate firms only argue appeals; many trial firms hand off appellate work. We do both — and that combination matters. A lawyer who has never been at trial often misreads the appellate record. A trial lawyer who never argues appeals does not know what the Court of Appeal is actually looking for.

We act for both appellants (clients seeking to overturn a judgment) and respondents (clients defending a favourable judgment). Most of our appellate work is in commercial, construction, real estate, and shareholder disputes, with substantial bankruptcy, judicial review, and arbitration-enforcement appellate work alongside.

Standards of Review — Why Most Appeals Fail

Clients often ask, “The trial judge got it wrong — surely the Court of Appeal will fix it?” The honest answer is: probably not, unless the error is the right kind of error.

• Findings of fact — reviewed for palpable and overriding error (Housen v. Nikolaisen). The trial judge saw the witnesses; the appellate court did not. A factual finding will not be disturbed simply because another inference was open.

• Pure questions of law — reviewed on a correctness standard. Statutory interpretation, the elements of a cause of action, constitutional questions. This is where most successful appeals live.

• Mixed questions of fact and law — generally reviewed on a deferential standard, unless an extricable legal error is identified. Framing the issue is critical.

• Discretionary decisions (costs, security for costs, adjournments) — reviewed for error in principle, misapprehension of evidence, or unreasonableness. Wide deference; rarely disturbed.

• Administrative decisions on judicial review — reasonableness after Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) v. Vavilov, with correctness reserved for narrow categories.

The first job of an appellate lawyer is to identify which category your grievance falls into — and to be honest with you when the answer is “deference, not appeal.”

Why a Trial-Lawyer-Run Appeal Practice Is Different

A common pattern in Ontario: the trial lawyer hands the file to a specialist appellate counsel, who has never met the witnesses, never argued the underlying motions, and is reading the trial record cold. That model has a place — particularly for pure questions of law decided on agreed facts. But it has a real cost when the appeal turns on what actually happened at trial.

Our firm runs the trial and the appeal under one roof. Paul Starkman has tried civil and commercial cases for over 30 years and argued the appeals that followed. Calvin Zhang trained directly under Paul and now runs both trial and appellate matters in his own right — including Wei v. Ye-Hang, 2026 ONCA 180 at the Court of Appeal.

The result, in practice: when we argue an appeal of a case we tried, we are answering questions from the panel about events we lived through, not events we read about in transcripts. When we are retained for an appeal of a case tried by another firm, we read the record like trial lawyers — looking for what actually happened, not what was supposed to happen on paper.

Frequently Asked Questions

Appellate Articles & Case Analyses