White-collar Crime and Investigations
Our expertise
Woods has extensive and diverse experience in corporate investigations, white-collar defence, and regulatory compliance. Our well-versed litigators conduct sensitive high-stakes internal investigations and defend clients in a wide range of contexts, including allegations of commercial and securities fraud, foreign corrupt practices, violations of trade sanctions, theft of confidential information, sexual harassment, and other serious employee misconduct.
We represent clients in Canada and throughout the world whose activities have drawn the attention of Canadian authorities and regulators. As well as representing Canadians whose activities are being investigated by foreign authorities, Woods also helps individuals, trustees, and corporations navigate multi-jurisdictional enforcement actions. Woods’ experience acting for both claimants and defendants at all stages of these proceedings puts us in a privileged position for handling such cases.
Representative work
For confidentiality and client privacy reasons, some of the cases we have acted on are not disclosed. Here are some brief illustrations:
- Represented a former SNC-Lavalin executive in various disputes related to the SNC-Lavalin scandal.
- Represented several executives of public issuers in the context of investigations conducted by the financial market authorities in Quebec and Ontario into suspicious transactions, the adequacy of continuous disclosure, insider trading, etc.
- Represented the defendant Dessau, at the time one of the largest engineering firms in Canada, in a class action concerning alleged collusion in the construction sector. We successfully demonstrated that the plaintiff had not suffered any direct harm and therefore had no arguable case.
