Roy Kim, P.Eng

Roy Kim is a trial lawyer at ATAC LAW and a professional engineer. He acts for employers, business owners, builders, and regulated professionals when a dispute, a claim, or a regulatory investigation puts their business or their licence at risk. He has appeared as trial counsel in the Provincial Court and the Supreme Court of British Columbia, in trials lasting up to three weeks, and has jury trial experience. Before his call to the bar he spent ten years designing complex Engineer-to-Order products in mechanical and electrical engineering, steel construction, and naval architecture in South Korea, Canada, and the United States. He reads a technical record the way the people who produced it do, and builds the argument from what it will support.

Construction disputes are at the centre of his practice. Roy acts for owners, construction managers, and contractors in claims under the Builders Lien Act and in the payment, holdback, deficiency, and delay disputes beneath them, from the first demand through trial in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. He has taken a dispute under a CCDC 5A construction management contract to judgment at trial, defended a trade contractor against an application to cancel its lien, and acted for an owner against a contractor for deficient work. He also drafts construction contracts and subcontracts, and he follows the implementation of British Columbia’s Construction Prompt Payment Act, which will introduce adjudication of construction payment disputes when it comes into force.

Roy also defends regulated professionals and employers in complaints and investigations. He represents registrants before Engineers and Geoscientists BC (“EGBC”), from the first response to a complaint through investigation, interviews, negotiated resolution, and contested citation hearing, and he has carried EGBC matters into judicial review before the Supreme Court of British Columbia. A citation hearing proceeds like a trial, and he conducts it as one: preparing witnesses and will-say statements, bringing and responding to pre-hearing applications, examining and cross-examining witnesses, including expert witnesses, and making submissions on the merits, penalty, and costs. He has also acted for registrants of other professional regulators, including traditional Chinese medicine practitioners. Because he holds the credential his engineering clients hold, he can assess what the standard of practice required at the moment in question, and where the regulator’s theory departs from it. For employers and business owners, he responds to Employment Standards Branch complaints and related regulatory investigations, and he appears before administrative tribunals and on judicial review where a decision needs to be challenged.

His business practice covers shareholder disputes, contract claims, non-competition and confidentiality claims, defamation claims including those over online reviews, and wrongful dismissal claims, in which he acts for employers. In commercial real estate, he acts in commercial tenancy disputes, including summary proceedings for possession under the Commercial Tenancy Act, in disputes over presale contracts, deposits, and completion, in strata disputes, and in foreclosure proceedings.

Roy practises in English and Korean. He establishes what the documents and the legislation will support, identifies the point on which the matter will turn, and takes the shortest course to a result. He knows when a technical question needs an expert, and when it needs only a lawyer who already understands it.