Shuni Zhang

Shuni Zhang is an associate in the Litigation and Dispute Resolution Practice Team at ATAC LAW. Shuni maintains a broad civil and commercial litigation practice, with particular depth in construction, advising clients across a range of industries. Her clients include contractors, suppliers, and owners on construction projects, shareholders and purchasers in the sale of closely held companies, commercial landlords and tenants, and First Nations advancing economic development. Her work begins at the point where a file turns on a question the authorities have not settled, and she carries the answer into the pleading, the agreement, or the advice that follows.

She advises on claims of lien and lien security under the Builders Lien Act, including the recovery of costs where a lien has been exaggerated and the interest payable on the excess portion of security posted to clear title. Her construction files follow the ordinary procedural sequence of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, from early assessment and pleadings through document production, applications, and preparation for trial. Within that sequence she is often given the evidentiary questions that decide a dispute, among them the qualification of a building inspector's opinion as expert rather than lay evidence, and the defences open to a marginal defendant drawn into a multi-party claim.

She is regularly given the applications that shape those disputes, including applications to strike a jury notice under the Supreme Court Civil Rules, limitation arguments capable of barring a claim, and costs on the higher scales of the tariff. She has developed positions on estoppel and waiver where a signed order to pay was later disputed, on shareholder advances treated as a loan rather than a capital contribution, and on the reach of the British Columbia courts over a foreign manufacturer in a product liability claim. Much of this work is multi-party, and the answer to a single question often determines which of the remaining parties can be held to account.

Her advisory practice covers the documents that carry a commercial relationship forward. She drafts and negotiates share purchase agreements and the separation agreements preceding them, prepares closing agendas, novation documents, and shareholder and director resolutions, and revises commercial leases and back to back subcontracts through successive rounds of client comment. For First Nations clients she has prepared a letter of intent for construction work on Nation land, settled the terms of a commercial lease, and considered the occupancy questions arising where land is held on reserve. Shuni treats research as the strategy rather than a step taken before it, on the view that a position is worth advancing only once the law governing it has been read to the end.