Expertise

(a)	Legislature
	We are thoroughly familiar with the Community Care Facilities Act, the Continuing Care Act, the Health Act, and the Mental Health Act and the respective regulations. As well, we have daily experience in the interpretation of legislation from our years of extensive experience acting for governments of many types.
(b)	Appeals and Tribunals
	We are also familiar with the procedures and laws applicable to the Community Care Facilities Appeal Board and the Environmental Appeal Board. We have been giving advice on mental health, continuing care service agreements and community care facility issues under our former contract with the Ministry of Health from 1997 to March 31, 2002.
(c)	Recommendation By Client
	When the Capital Regional District Health staff were transferred to the Capital Health Region, they opted to continue to use our firm’s services, being well satisfied with the quality and level of service we provided. In fact, they recommended us for our five year contract with the Ministry of Health to provide legal services to all the health authorities.
(d)	Demand Driven Service
	We are well accustomed to providing demand driven legal services to our local government and health authority clients throughout the province and to provincial ministries and Crown corporations.
(e)	Seminars
	In addition to responding to legal service requests, we provide seminars on matters of interest to our public health clients, such as freedom of information and protection of privacy; practice and procedure before the Environmental Appeal Board; risk management policies; and bylaw drafting. We have regularly provided seminars to the MHOs, EHOs and CLOs over the past five years. Our lawyers take an active role in client education programs as well as Continuing Legal Education programs.
(f)	Publications
	We have a content rich website at www.sms.bc.ca which is updated frequently. This site also contains photographs and biographies of our lawyers.