Linting Zhang

Linting Zhang is an associate lawyer at ATAC LAW who is often retained when a single event has produced several legal problems at once. A criminal charge that also unsettles a marriage, an immigration status, and a business is the kind of matter that reaches him, and he takes responsibility for each strand rather than referring the client onward. He works in English and Mandarin, and many of those he represents are Mandarin-speaking residents of the Lower Mainland, some holding interests or family obligations in China. He came to law from the social sciences, where he researched and taught, and from international trade, where he managed projects, and both show in how he assembles a chronology and explains an agreement to the person signing it.

Criminal defence takes the largest share of his time. He negotiates with Crown counsel toward resolution, assembles proposals supported by counselling records, character letters, and evidence of rehabilitation, appears at initial and remand appearances and at Crown pre-trial, works through disclosure including multimedia and particulars, and applies to vary release conditions that have become unworkable for a household. A substantial share of that work concerns peace bonds, which he pursues for people who fear another person and resists for those against whom one is sought, dealing directly with investigating officers as well as with Crown.

Family matters frequently arrive alongside the criminal ones. He prepares and revises separation and cohabitation agreements, and goes through them with clients clause by clause so that nothing is signed unexplained. He advises on divorce, the division of a family home and its mortgage, and parenting arrangements where one parent intends to return to China, and has addressed the recognition in British Columbia of a divorce granted there. Where a no-contact condition in a criminal file governs whether a parent may enter the family residence, he manages both proceedings together rather than in isolation.

His civil work covers contractual disputes and the applications that shape them, including applications to strike a pleading, to dismiss a claim, and to enforce a settlement once reached. He is heard at the Residential Tenancy Branch on either side of a tenancy, advises on commercial leasing disputes and the remedies open to each party, and takes smaller claims to the Civil Resolution Tribunal. In employment he addresses wrongful and constructive dismissal, the enforceability of a termination clause, and Employment Standards investigations. He also prepares wills and applications for the administration of an estate. What holds the work together is a preference for the practical remedy over the elaborate one, and a habit of telling clients plainly which of their several problems needs attention first.