The appellants sued their former solicitor for negligence after discovering a merged title issue under the Planning Act prior to closing a real estate transaction.
The solicitor offered to correct the issue at his own expense via a nunc pro tunc application, but the appellants' new lawyer secretly pursued a parallel severance application and sought to recover those costs.
The trial judge found the solicitor negligent but held the costs of the parallel application were not reasonably foreseeable.
The trial judge also awarded costs against the appellants for failing to accept settlement offers that exceeded their trial recovery.
The Divisional Court dismissed the appeal, finding no palpable and overriding error in the trial judge's foreseeability analysis or costs award.
