Executive Summary: Key Legal and Evidentiary Issues

• Allegations of solicitor’s negligence, perjury, and conspiracy by former and subsequent lawyers were held to disclose no reasonable cause of action.
• The appellant attempted to relitigate professional negligence issues already determined in prior proceedings arising from a divorce-related fee dispute.
• Evidence relating to 2008 meetings with counsel had previously been rejected as fresh evidence on appeal because the appellant gave no explanation for not adducing it at trial.
• Claims were characterized as frivolous, vexatious, scandalous, and an abuse of process, justifying striking the claim without leave to amend.
• Rule 2.1.01 was applied at the appellate level as a streamlined mechanism to summarily dismiss a meritless appeal on the face of the pleadings.
• The addition of new defendants (including another law firm) was found insufficient to reopen or relitigate issues and evidence already adjudicated.

Facts and procedural background
The litigation in Vacaru v. Legge has its roots in a long-running and acrimonious family law dispute. During the appellant Felicia Vacaru’s divorce proceedings, she retained a forensic accounting firm to provide expert evidence concerning financial issues in that matrimonial case. A separate conflict then arose between Ms. Vacaru and the accounting firm when the firm claimed it had not been paid in full for its services. The accounting firm commenced an action for unpaid fees, naming both Ms. Vacaru and her then lawyer as defendants.
In that fee action, Ms. Vacaru responded not only by defending against the claim but also by advancing a crossclaim against her own lawyer, alleging professional negligence in the handling of matters related to the divorce and the expert engagement. The Superior Court of Justice ultimately granted judgment in favour of the accounting firm for the fees owed and dismissed the appellant’s crossclaim against her lawyer (Marmer Penner Inc. v. Purcaru, 2021 ONSC 3785, as described in the Court of Appeal’s later reasons). Ms. Vacaru appealed that outcome to the Court of Appeal for Ontario, but her appeal was dismissed (Marmer Penner Inc. v. Vacaru, 2022 ONCA 280, again as summarized in the later appellate decision).
Even after losing both at first instance and on appeal in the fee litigation, Ms. Vacaru continued to pursue claims arising from the same underlying events. She commenced a new, separate action against her former lawyer, who had been the subject of her earlier crossclaim, and she also sued the lawyers who had represented her on the crossclaim. This meant that the new proceeding targeted both the original solicitor and subsequent counsel. In this new action, she alleged that the lawyers had conspired to commit perjury, in fact committed perjury, and placed falsified documents into evidence. She further moved to add the professional liability insurer, LawPro, as a party, asserting that it knew or ought to have known of the alleged misconduct by the respondent lawyers.
The respondents reacted by bringing a motion to strike the new statement of claim. They relied on several procedural rules under the Ontario Rules of Civil Procedure—specifically rules 21.01(1)(b), 21.01(3)(d), and 25.11—to argue that the pleading disclosed no reasonable cause of action, and that it was frivolous, vexatious, and an abuse of the court’s process. The motion judge agreed. In Vacaru v. Legge, 2025 ONSC 218, the Superior Court of Justice struck Ms. Vacaru’s statement of claim in its entirety, without granting her leave to amend, and dismissed the action as disclosing no reasonable cause of action and constituting a frivolous or vexatious proceeding and/or an abuse of process.

The evidentiary disputes and prior appellate ruling
A recurring evidentiary theme in the litigation concerns meetings Ms. Vacaru says she had with her lawyer in February and March 2008. According to the Court of Appeal’s later account, she relied on these meetings to support her allegations that her former lawyer and other counsel had acted improperly. However, these same alleged communications were already put forward in earlier litigation.
In the previous appeal relating to the accounting firm’s fee action (Marmer Penner Inc. v. Vacaru, 2022 ONCA 280), Ms. Vacaru attempted to introduce evidence of the 2008 meetings as fresh evidence on appeal. The Court of Appeal refused to admit that material as fresh evidence because she did not provide any explanation for her failure to adduce the evidence at trial. In other words, the appellate court had already considered, and rejected, the attempt to rely on those communications in the prior appeal.
In the new action against her former lawyer and the additional law firm, Ms. Vacaru once again grounded her claims in the same alleged 2008 meetings. The Court of Appeal in 2025 noted that she was simply repackaging allegations already advanced unsuccessfully in the lower court and in the earlier appeal. The fact that she now sued a new defendant (the law firm that had represented the lawyer on the earlier crossclaim) did not change the underlying evidentiary landscape or create a new basis to revisit questions already adjudicated. The court emphasized that the addition of a new defendant, standing alone, does not permit a party to relitigate previously determined issues or to re-advance evidence that had been rejected under the law of fresh evidence.

The motion judge’s decision to strike the claim
The motion judge’s decision in 2025 ONSC 218 (as summarized by the Court of Appeal) turned on three main features of the new claim: the legal sufficiency of the pleaded causes of action, the scandalous and vexatious nature of the allegations, and the misuse of the courts to re-run decided disputes. The judge found that the statement of claim disclosed no reasonable cause of action because the pleaded material facts, even if taken as true, could not support the far-reaching allegations of solicitor negligence, perjury, falsification of evidence, and conspiracy advanced by the plaintiff.
Beyond legal insufficiency, the judge considered the tone and content of the pleading, which asserted wide-ranging wrongdoing by multiple lawyers and sought to revisit matters already fully determined in earlier proceedings. On that basis, the judge found that the claim was frivolous and vexatious and amounted to an abuse of process. This conclusion was supported by the fact that the issues of professional negligence, the role of the accounting firm, and the underlying evidentiary allegations had already been litigated to finality and that an earlier attempt to rely on the 2008 communications as fresh evidence had been rejected on appeal. The motion judge therefore struck the statement of claim without leave to amend and dismissed the action.

The appeal to the Court of Appeal for Ontario
Unwilling to accept the dismissal of her new action, Ms. Vacaru appealed the motion judge’s order to the Court of Appeal for Ontario. The respondents invoked rule 2.1.01 of the Rules of Civil Procedure, which provides for the summary dismissal of proceedings or motions that are frivolous, vexatious or otherwise an abuse of the court’s process. They filed the required form asking the Court of Appeal to deal with the appeal under this streamlined procedure.
Rule 2.1.01 is intended for only the clearest of cases, where the abusive character of a proceeding is apparent on the face of the materials and can be addressed without full submissions or an oral hearing. As the Court of Appeal reiterated, rule 2.1 offers an “attenuated process” designed to protect the limited resources of the justice system from being consumed by plainly meritless proceedings. The court stressed that while the rule is to be used sparingly, it plays an important role in screening out claims and appeals that are evidently without substance and that would otherwise drain judicial resources and burden other litigants waiting for their matters to be heard.
In this case, the Court of Appeal determined that the criteria for using rule 2.1.01 were met. The appeal was heard in writing, with notice to Ms. Vacaru and an opportunity for her to file responding submissions. After reviewing the record, the appellate panel concluded that the appeal from the motion judge’s order was itself meritless.

Key reasoning of the Court of Appeal
The Court of Appeal’s brief reasons focused on the nature of the claim and the procedural context. First, it held that the appellant’s claim failed to disclose a reasonable cause of action. The allegations that the former lawyer and other counsel had conspired to commit perjury, had actually perjured themselves, and had introduced falsified documents were not supported by a tenable legal foundation in the pleadings. Second, the court emphasized that the claim rested on scandalous allegations. The repeated assertions of perjury and conspiracy by multiple lawyers, without adequately pleaded material facts capable of supporting them, reinforced the conclusion that the claim was not a good faith attempt to vindicate cognizable rights but rather an abusive vehicle for airing grievances.
Third, the Court of Appeal highlighted that the new proceeding was essentially an effort to relitigate professional negligence and evidentiary issues that had already been decided. The appellant was, in substance, trying again to contest the conduct of her former lawyer and the outcome of the fee litigation, despite the fact that both the trial-level decision and the earlier appeal had gone against her. The continued reliance on the 2008 meetings, which had already been the subject of an unsuccessful fresh-evidence motion, further underscored the duplicative and abusive character of the new claim.

Use of rule 2.1.01 and final disposition
Having identified the claim as meritless on its face and as an improper attempt to repeat previously decided disputes, the Court of Appeal concluded that the appeal belonged in the narrow category of cases suitable for disposition under rule 2.1.01. The rule authorizes the court to dismiss a proceeding, in whole or in part, if it is frivolous, vexatious or otherwise an abuse of process, without resorting to a full appeal hearing. In its reasons, the panel referred to the prior appellate cases that describe rule 2.1 as a narrow but important screening tool, applicable only where the abusive nature of the proceeding is apparent from the pleadings.
Applying that standard, the Court of Appeal held that Ms. Vacaru’s appeal from the order striking her claim and dismissing her action was a meritless appeal. The panel therefore dismissed the appeal pursuant to rule 2.1.01. This left standing the motion judge’s order striking the statement of claim without leave to amend and dismissing the action. In practical terms, the series of decisions means that Ms. Vacaru remains bound by the outcome of the original fee action and its appeal, and she is precluded from re-advancing the same professional negligence and evidentiary allegations under the guise of a new lawsuit against her former and subsequent lawyers or their insurer.
No policy terms or insurance-policy clauses were discussed in the appellate reasons, despite the appellant’s attempt to bring LawPro into the litigation. The focus remained on the procedural propriety of the new action, the sufficiency of the pleaded causes of action, and the evidentiary recycling of previously rejected material. In the final result, the successful parties in the Court of Appeal were the respondents—John Legge, Legge and Legge, Tanya Pagliaroli, and Tap Law—whose position that the appeal was abusive and meritless was accepted. The appellate reasons, as provided, do not specify any monetary award, damages, or quantified costs ordered in their favour, and on the available text the total amount of any costs or other monetary relief cannot be determined.