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Facts of the mandate and the default judgment
Les Services de béton universel ltée is a construction company providing commercial and industrial concrete services, wholly owned and managed by its sole shareholder and director, Gavin Chortyk. In February 2019, Groupe Main d’œuvre inc. brought an action in the Court of Québec against the company, seeking approximately $30,256 for labour services in a construction project (the Main d’œuvre file). The company initially had other representation, but in November 2019, Chortyk turned to lawyer Constantin Kyritsis, who was then in practice but is now temporarily struck off, to take over the defense. The evidence showed that on 13 November 2019, Kyritsis received a clear mandate to represent the company in the Main d’œuvre file. Despite this, he never filed a defense and he failed to attend the matter when it was called at the provisional roll on 30 January 2020. The plaintiff in that action, unaware of any defense, had already moved for default, and on 4 May 2020, during the pandemic suspension of civil delays, the Court of Québec issued a default judgment against Les Services de béton universel ltée for $30,256.87.
Chortyk learned of the default judgment in May 2020 and informed Kyritsis. Both then discussed filing a motion for revocation (retractation) of judgment. The lawyer told his client that he needed further information and sworn statements to complete the proceeding and followed up in June and July 2020. However, Chortyk did not respond or make himself available, citing personal and family difficulties. No motion was filed during the summer despite the lawyer’s attempts to contact the client. Matters escalated when, on 18 September 2020, Groupe Main d’œuvre executed the default judgment by seizing the company’s bank account. That same day, Chortyk contacted Kyritsis and provided brief reasons he intended to advance in support of the revocation. Within 24 hours, however, the company terminated Kyritsis’s mandate and engaged new counsel.
The new lawyers filed, on 30 September 2020, a motion for revocation of judgment and declaration of abuse in the Main d’œuvre file, without calling on Kyritsis to sign a sworn statement or testify. On 23 October 2020, the Court of Québec granted revocation, quashed the 4 May 2020 default judgment, lifted the seizures, restored the parties to their original positions and ordered continuation of the original action. Meanwhile, in February 2021, Les Services de béton universel ltée and Chortyk sent a formal demand to Kyritsis and then, in May 2021, launched this professional liability suit in the Superior Court. They sought compensatory and punitive damages for alleged malpractice in relation to the Main d’œuvre file, and also attacked the way Kyritsis defended himself in this very action, asking that his defense be declared abusive.
Issues of standing and separateness of the corporation
One of the first substantive questions was whether Chortyk personally had a sufficient legal interest to sue. Relying on well-established principles of corporate separateness, the court held that it was only Les Services de béton universel ltée that was a party to the Main d’œuvre litigation and the client of Kyritsis. The default judgment was rendered solely against the company, and the seizure was executed solely against corporate assets; no judgment or enforcement steps were taken against Chortyk personally. The alleged faults were all tied to the lawyer’s mandate for the corporation in that file. The court emphasized that damages flowing from a wrong to the company belong to the company. Even a sole shareholder and director cannot simply recharacterize corporate loss as personal damage. In the absence of a distinct extracontractual claim for a separate and personal injury, Chortyk lacked standing. His action was therefore dismissed, while the company’s claim continued.
Professional faults and the scope of the lawyer’s mandate
The court confirmed that Kyritsis had undertaken a professional mandate to represent the company in the Main d’œuvre file and accepted his admitted faults: he failed to file a response on behalf of the company and failed to request a postponement at the 30 January 2020 provisional roll. These omissions clearly breached his duty of means and competence to act diligently and to protect the client’s procedural position. The company alleged additional misconduct: misleading communications after 30 January 2020; failure to contact opposing counsel; failure to act after suspension of delays was lifted; false claims about having prepared draft revocation proceedings; and improper billing for work supposedly not done. The court examined in detail a 4 February 2020 text message in which Kyritsis mentioned an “administrative error” and suggested that prosecutors would take care of cancelling any document received. On the evidence, this message referred not to the Main d’œuvre civil file but to a separate penal traffic matter in which he had obtained an adjournment for Chortyk. The court found his explanation credible and rejected the allegation that he had sought to conceal what had occurred in the Main d’œuvre case.
On the summer 2020 period, the judge accepted that Kyritsis had drafted skeleton versions of a motion for revocation and supporting affidavits but needed the client’s information and signature to finalize them. He followed up in June and July 2020, stressing that although delays were suspended, it was better to proceed sooner rather than later. Chortyk, however, was unresponsive until the day of the seizure. Given that context, the court held that the plaintiff had not proved that Kyritsis did nothing or pretended to work on documents he never prepared. Similarly, the claim that he was bound to contact opposing counsel or negotiate was rejected because his mandate, as evidenced by communications, was narrowly focused on preparing the revocation proceedings; direct negotiations with the other side would have gone beyond that defined scope. As for billing, the evidence showed that payments made by Chortyk were largely on-account lumps covering multiple files—personal and corporate—and could not be clearly tied to the Main d’œuvre mandate. Only one payment was linked to another identified matter. Faced with contradictory, incomplete accounting evidence, the court refused to find that he had improperly charged for work in the Main d’œuvre file.
Ultimately, the court limited the established professional faults to the two admitted omissions: failure to file a defense and failure to appear and seek a postponement at the January 2020 roll. The rest of the alleged misconduct was not proven or did not amount to fault in light of the proven scope of the mandate and the client’s own conduct.
Causation, mitigation and assessment of damages
Once fault was identified, the central question became causation and quantum. Under Quebec civil law, it was not enough to show professional fault; the company had to establish, on a balance of probabilities, that its damage was the immediate and direct consequence of those faults. The most significant head of claimed loss was over $25,000 in legal fees paid to the new law firm Dupuis Paquin to obtain revocation of the default judgment and to deal with seizure and ancillary procedures. The court accepted that some portion of those fees could be recoverable as damages linked to Kyritsis’s failures, but only to the extent they were reasonable and directly related to undoing the default judgment. It noted that no lawyer from Dupuis Paquin testified and that the account description lacked clear detail, with extensive internal communications and apparent duplication of work between two lawyers, including billing totalling over ten hours for a hearing that lasted only about eighty minutes. The firm also expanded the scope of their work by adding abuse of process allegations against Groupe Main d’œuvre and professional fault allegations against another lawyer, Me Gagnon, which increased complexity but could not fairly be attributed to Kyritsis’s earlier omissions.
The court found the total billed amount disproportionate to the relatively modest $30,000 judgment being challenged. Still, it accepted that the revocation motion was necessary as a direct result of Kyritsis’s failure to file a defense and appear, and that some seizure-related work was also causally connected. However, it held that the company’s own inaction—by ignoring the lawyer’s follow-up requests and failing to finalize a revocation during the summer—contributed to the scope and urgency of the later procedures. This did not wholly break the causal chain but justified an apportionment of responsibility. With the documentation too imprecise to separate, line by line, revocation-related fees from other work, the court exercised its discretion to fix a global, reasonable amount. It limited recoverable fees and disbursements to two-thirds of the portion fairly linked to the period between seizure on 18 September 2020 and late October 2020, which it saw as closely tied to the fallout from the default judgment. That computation led to a principal award of $14,965.68 in fees and disbursements, to which applicable federal and provincial taxes were added, for a total of $17,206.79.
Other claimed heads of damage were rejected. The company sought approximately $1,437 in alleged fees paid directly to Kyritsis for the Main d’œuvre mandate, but the court found no conclusive evidence linking any specific payment to that file. A $50,000 claim for reputational harm and lost business opportunities, based on testimony from an Amcor production manager and the public works director of the Town of Hudson, was also refused. The witnesses confirmed that receipt of seizure notices had made them wary and led them either not to invite the company to tender on a later job or to stop considering adding it to a list of pre-approved concrete contractors. However, there had been no firm promises of work, and the company could not quantify any concrete lost contract. The court characterized the alleged loss as, at best, a loss of chance that remained too hypothetical and unproven to satisfy the required standard of proof.
Finally, a claim for roughly $5,000 in cheque-cashing (Insta-Chèques) fees was dismissed. Full, uncensored statements produced at trial showed that using that service was a recurring business practice of the company and not an exceptional response to the Main d’œuvre seizure. The evidence suggested that the company often resorted to cheque-cashing due to other enforcement actions, including from tax authorities, and that it could have chosen other banking arrangements. The court found no sufficient causal link between these fees and the particular professional faults at issue.
Punitive damages and allegations of abusive defense
Les Services de béton universel ltée also asked for punitive (exemplary) damages of $250,000 based on an alleged breach of rights protected by the Quebec Charter of human rights and freedoms. The court recalled that punitive damages require a specific statutory basis and, under article 49 of the Charter, an “illicit and intentional” infringement of a protected right. It adopted the Supreme Court’s articulation that the defendant must either desire the harmful consequences of his conduct or act in full knowledge that those consequences are the immediate and highly probable result of his acts, a threshold that goes beyond even serious negligence. Granting that Kyritsis was a practising lawyer who knew, in general, the consequences of failing to file a defense, the judge nonetheless accepted his explanation that the omissions in this case stemmed from confusion, oversight and communication problems rather than any intent to cause harm. There was no clear identification, in evidence, of a particular Charter right of the company that had been intentionally violated. The court thus found no basis in fact or law for punitive damages, and it also noted the complete absence of evidence of the lawyer’s capacity to pay such a large punitive amount.
In a further escalation, the plaintiffs asked that the court characterize Kyritsis’s defense in this professional liability action as abusive and condemn him to pay their full legal fees in this case, plus additional punitive damages of $500,000. The court refused. It reiterated that procedural abuse under article 51 of the Code of Civil Procedure is reserved for conduct demonstrating bad faith, intent to harass or oppress, or at least reckless disregard for the proper use of the courts. The fact that Kyritsis entered late admissions to narrow issues, at the court’s request, did not make his defense abusive, especially given that many of his arguments on standing, excessive quantum and lack of proof ultimately succeeded. The Superior Court stressed the need for prudence in labelling defenses as abusive, to avoid chilling access to justice and discouraging parties from advancing good-faith but difficult or novel positions. Seeing no evidence that he acted to cause needless prejudice rather than to defend himself, and viewing the plaintiffs’ own massive claim—far exceeding the value of the underlying $30,000 default judgment—as disproportionate, the court rejected the abuse of process claim and the associated requests for extra fees and punitive damages.
Outcome and practical implications
In its formal orders, the Superior Court partially granted the company’s professional liability action and dismissed all of Chortyk’s personal claims for lack of legal interest. It declared that only Les Services de béton universel ltée had standing and rejected every attempt to pierce the corporate veil to allow the shareholder-director to claim directly. On liability, the court held that Kyritsis had committed professional faults by failing to file a defense and by not appearing or seeking a postponement at the January 2020 provisional roll in the Main d’œuvre file, but it declined to find any additional wrongdoing in his communications, summer 2020 conduct, or billing practices, given the limited scope of the mandate and the client’s unresponsiveness. It then carefully reconstructed damages, allowing only those legal fees and related disbursements that were reasonable, directly linked to the consequences of the admitted faults and not inflated by new strategies or by the company’s own later inaction. On that basis, the Superior Court ordered Constantin Kyritsis to pay Les Services de béton universel ltée $17,206.79 in compensatory damages (taxes included), together with interest and the additional indemnity under article 1619 C.c.Q. from 12 May 2021 and legal costs in the cause, while noting that the precise monetary value of accrued interest and costs could not be fixed within the text of the judgment itself and would have to be determined in accordance with applicable rules.
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Plaintiff
Defendant
Court
Quebec Superior CourtCase Number
500-17-116778-211Practice Area
Civil litigationAmount
$ 17,206Winner
PlaintiffTrial Start Date