Can I eSign Colorado Gift Affidavit

Can i document type e sign gift affidavit colorado

welcome to you counsel in our previous lecture we had explains what is an affidavit of documents and when does it need to be prepared and produced in this lecture we take a step further and explain how do you determine which documents are relevant and ought to be disclosed in your affidavit of documents we begin with our usual disclaimer that this lecture is not legal advice if you have any specific questions regarding your issues you should contact a lawyer or paralegal or the Law Society of Ontario for a referral now rule 30 point zero three and seventy six point zero three sub one of the Rules of Civil Procedure discuss affidavit of documents and explain what should be contained in that affidavit of document we have explained that in our previous lecture if you haven't watched it please do so before reviewing this lecture broadly speaking the rules require that parties should disclose all documents in parties knowledge information and belief these documents should be relevant to any matters in issue in the action and they are either or have either in the parties possession control or power or have been in the past in parties possession control or pop all of those documents are to be disclosed in the affidavit of documents and once again please review our other lecture in today's lecture we'll talk about how do you determine which document is relevant and which document is not relevant and this could be described as relevance test there are a number of definitions that have been set out in in various court cases we have picked a few just to give you a flavor of how the courts have explained relevance in different context first example any two facts to which it is applied ie relevance are so related to each other that according to the common course of events one either taken by itself or in connection with other facts proves or renders probable the past present or future existence or non-existence off the other that's one example I'll let you think about it and come back to it read it again another example for one fact to be relevant to another there must be a connection or nexus between the two which makes it possible to infer the existence of one from the existence of the other one fact is not relevant to another if it does not have real probative value one more definition requires a determination of whether as a matter of human experience and logic the existence of fact a makes the existence or non-existence of fact be more probable than it would be without the existence of fact a if it does not does then fact a is relevant to fact B as long as fact B is in itself a material fact in issue or is relevant to a material fact an issue in the litigation the fact a is relevant and prima facie admissible one more example and I'll have one more in the end any document which directly or indirectly may enable a party to advance his own case or destroy that of his adversary or which may fairly lead to a train of enquiry to disclose evidence which may have either of those consequences must be disclosed and finally relevance is based on the party's pleadings to determine if the documents sought are relevant I must decide if the documents sought tend to prove or disprove a proposition or fact advanced in the party's pleadings now I have given you all these examples so that a you can repeatedly read them these are quotes from actual cases court cases and so you can understand that courts have defined relevance in so many different ways once you complete the reading you may come to the understanding that all of these definitions are more or less the same but I can tell you that they are not and the courts have defined relevance differently and that is why it is important for you to understand how the relevance test is actually applied so all of the definitions that I've given not all of them are uniform not all of them are considered equal to properly understand relevance I believe one way to do so is to understand the history of relevance test so in the past in Ontario the test for relevance was called semblance of relevance and now as of 2010 the rules were amended and now the test is simply relevance so the difference between the two is very simple in semblance of relevance the documents that were considered relevant were viewed broadly so if there was any chance any semblance that the document could be relevant to the issues in that court action then they will be considered relevant but in 2010 the the court has the rules have narrowed the definition of relevance so the documents must be relevant to the issues to one of the issues or any of the issues in the litigation if they're not relevant then then it's not a matter of they could be or there is a semblance of relevance so the definition is narrow and there were few reasons for changing these rules some of the reasons were that the course did not want parties to conduct fishing expedition go looking for evidence that may not even be relevant and trying to find out a case and trying to find out evidence to support their position or destroy the other party's position because it took longer it cost more and it may have been disproportionate to the case that was before the court so the that was one reason the other reason was that courts wanted to deal with issues efficiently and so the narrower the definition is all the relevant documents will be produced in the documents that are irrelevant will not waste Court's time unnecessarily parties time money and effort in in weeding through all those documents that could be and could not be relevant to the issues so in any event the definition was changed and so what you want to take away from today's lecture is that the definition now is narrower either the document is relevant or it's not the semblance of relevance test is no longer there so on that basis I want to go back as I said when you review those definitions that I give you the there's one definition this one that I read any document which directly or indirectly may enable a party to advance his own case or destroyed that of his adversary or which may fairly lead to a train of inquiry to disclose evidence which may have either of those consequences must be disclosed now this is I I believe that when I read all these definitions I did not find this definition to be particularly different than all of the other definitions that I tried but apparently as the courts have stated that this definition is different it is too broad it was from one of the British Columbia Court cases which was coded in one of the Ontario cases one master relied on this definition and decided on certain relevance of certain documents when the case was appealed the court overturned masters decision and basically said that this particular definition is related to semblance of relevance test not the relevance test which is presently enforced in Ontario the next definition that I picked up which I honestly believe is not much different than the one that I just read is this one this is from a 2019 case which basically says that the third document tends to prove or disprove a proposition or fact advance in the party's pleadings then that document is relevant and this is probably the simplest way to look at it if you have stated a fact or if there is a fact in your pleadings or other party's pleadings then you look at the document and and that you determine whether that document proves any of the things that are stated in that in that pleadings and and if it is not then if it advances that position confirms it or denies it then it is relevant if it doesn't do anything to that particular statement or position then it is not considered relevant now how do you figure all of this out as I said the definitions are not uniform we talked about the history so then determining relevance is really a practical matter if you have done this for a few years like lawyers do then it is relatively relatively easier for you to determine which document is relevant and which is not but there are a number of fights about these issues that happen in courts all the time and that is simply because two parties using their common sense using their experience may not agree on what document is relevant and what is not so it's really a practical matter the court uses experience and judgment to determine which document is indeed relevant let's give you an example so that you may be able to get some sense of what a document which document could be relevant let's take a fact and we assumed this fact as part of a party's pleadings the facts says the defendant delivered its invoice by email to the plaintiff On January 3rd 2019 this is a fact that has been stated if the other party challenges it disputes this fact then this fact needs to be proven right and if this facts need to be proven then that particular email that we're talking about here is a relevant document it ought to be disclosed because this email is the one which attaches an invoice and it was sent on January 3rd by the defendant to the plaintiff so the email in a very simple common sensical way is a relevant document that ought to be produced now let's say the defendant had sent another email to the plaintiff on the same day on a different matter not in closing an invoice but on something else is that a man email that is relevant no it's not relevant as far as this particular fact is concerned because the existence of that email the content of that email as long as it does not contain that invoice does not on its face provide support this fact in any way now that email that second email could be relevant on some other issue for example that email could state let's say that the parties in this case the plaintiff advances a position that the plaintiff and the defendant had never communicated by email let's say that is one of the position that has been advanced by the plaintiff then in that instance the second email becomes relevant because that is an email that actually challenges disputes that position advanced by plaintiff because it proves that there was an email that was sent by the defendant to the plaintiff right so you essentially look at the fact that has been pleaded by you or by the other side and look at the evidence and then figure out whether the issues in that pleading are advanced challenged or in any way connected to that particular document and if that document proves or disproves that particular factor position then that document is relevant so what to take away from today's lecture first of all when you are laughing pleadings you have to be extremely careful so you have to very accurately state your facts because whatever you state whatever position you advance remember that you will have to prove that by evidence either documentary evidence survivor voci evidence but you'll have to prove it so you want to make sure that your pleadings are accurate in terms of the evidence that you're going to later provide you also want to carefully review other party's pleadings because when you review your own documents or other side's document you may be able to find discrepancy in their pleadings and their evidence and you will be able to challenge their position the facts are position by relying on that particular pieces of evidence and also not to forget that when you have this obligation to disclose all these documents you want to carefully assess all the documents to make sure that they are relevant and you are disclosing all those documents now a related and important rule that you want to keep in mind is rule 30 point-0 5 which says that disclosure or production of a document shall not be taken as an admission of its relevance or admissibility so what this rule does is that if you if you want to caution err on the side of caution and produce documents that you believe may be relevant you're not sure you disclose them in any way that does not mean yours you are taking the position or you're admitting that the document is indeed relevant so this particular rule saves you from from that position so the other side will not then hold you accountable and say because you disclosed this document you have confirmed the admissibility of that document as a relevant document or you you want this document to be admitted as evidence that is not the case so there is no sort of deemed relevance or deemed admission just because the document has been disclosed so that means that you can you can if if if you here and include documents that were that were you were not sure that they were relevant or not that will be fine at trial you can you can you can state the position that you believe the documents were not relevant so hopefully this is this is the complicated area as I said two lawyers cannot agree at times on what documents are relevant what is not but at least it gives you a line of thinking in terms of how you figure out when you're looking through your documents or other sites documents to make a determination whether the documents are relevant or not so hopefully this was helpful hope will bring more lectures on these topics as we go along thank you for watching