Smart founders ask their lawyer.

Goodlawyer’s Annual Corporate Return Plan is designed for private Canadian companies that are incorporated either federally or provincially and are in good standing under all applicable governing corporate law statutes.

Our Annual Corporate Return Plan is not applicable to sole proprietors, partnerships, not-for-profit entities or publicly traded (distributing) companies.

The Annual Corporate Return plan covers filing for one federal incorporation with one extra-provincial registration in AB, BC, or ON, or one provincial incorporation in AB, BC, or ON. Additional government fees may apply for corporations outside of AB, BC, ON, or corporations with multiple extra-provincial registrations.

Learn more about our Annual Corporate Return Plans.

Your corporate return and tax return are not the same thing. Although both are legally required for corporations in Canada, they report on different things to different government bodies. Goodlawyer DOES NOT file your tax returns, we DO file your corporate returns.

✘  Your tax return:

• Reports the corporation's finances, like revenue, profit, expenses, etc.

• Filed with the Canada Revenue Agency

• Comes with a balance to be paid that will vary depending on your company’s financial declaration and the amount of collected sales tax to be remitted

• Payment is usually due 2 months after the corporation’s fiscal year end

✔  Your corporate return:

• Reports on the corporation’s information, like directors, shareholders, officers, registered offices, etc.

• Filed with the respective corporate registry for your corporation (ex. Corporations Canada for federal incorporations, Ontario Business Registry for ON corporations and extra-provincial registrations, etc.)

• Each jurisdiction has a set filing fee ranging from $10 - $500 depending on the province.

• Corporate returns are usually due within 30 days of your corporation’s anniversary date (a corporate return filing is not required in your corporation’s first year)

Government filing fees for Federal, BC, AB, or ON incorporations are included. Additional government fees and charges may apply to Annual Returns completed for:

• Provincial corporations with extra-provincial registrations

• Federal corporations with more than one extra-provincial registration

• Corporations with principal or extra-provincial registrations in provinces other than BC, AB, or ON.

• Corporations whose substantive corporate information has changed since the filing of their last Annual Return, such that they must file a Notice of Change of Address, Notice of Change of Directors or other official Notice prior to completing their Annual Corporate Return.

The Annual Corporate Return Plan does not include minute book reconciliation or maintenance if your corporate documents have not been kept up to date. If your minute book needs work before we can file your return, you might need to hire a good lawyer to get you sorted.

No, not at the moment. You can book as many sessions as you need with as many lawyers as you need. The only restriction that we impose is that Pros are not allowed to stack and book back-to-back Advice Sessions. For issues that you think require more than 15 minutes, please book a Legal Strategy Session ($99 for Pros).

If we start seeing too many Pros abuse Advice Sessions, we might have to impose limits in the future.

Advice Sessions ($0 for Pros) are a 15 minute call with your lawyer to help you identify or diagnose common legal issues and a suitable plan of attack.

Legal Strategy Sessions ($99 for Pros) are for more complex questions that require a deep dive and give you up to 1 hour of your lawyer's time. This 60 minutes might be spent entirely on one call with you, or might need to be split up into shorter calls and some time for your lawyer to research your issue. Either way, total lawyer time is up to 60 minutes.

No. Law Society regulations require lawyers to keep extensive documentation of each person they deal with and Goodlawyer Pro accounts can only contain the profile of one person. This is an inconvenience we're aware of and hope to solve in the near future.

Yes. You can work with a different lawyer every day, if you want to. If you'd rather work exclusively with a single lawyer, you can do that too.

Annual Pro subscribers receive a 50% reduction on service fees for any Fixed-fee and custom services. That means we only charge 10% on top of legal fees rather than the standard 20% for the marketplace.

Pros also get $100 off of Legal Strategy Sessions (regular price $199, Pro price $99), and starting January 5th 2022, $50 off of every Contract Review.

Cancelling your membership will cancel the automatic renewal of your subscription. You will still retain access to all of the Pro features until your renewal date, at which point you will lose access to all Pro features. You’ll still have access to your Goodlawyer account and the marketplace, and won’t lose any of your records or previous interactions with lawyers.

If you have specific questions about a specific contract, you will need to book a Contract Review, and Pros get $50 off every Contract Review.

If you're looking for high-level advice on a topic related to contracts, you can ask your lawyer in an Advice Session and your Pro membership will cover it for free.

Some of the lawyers on Goodlawyer have experience with the laws in foreign countries, particularly America. It can be difficult to find these lawyers when you need them, so we recommend booking a Legal Concierge™ service so that they can point you in the right direction.

If you think you're only going to need a single 15-minute call with a lawyer, consider booking an Advice Session instead of signing up for Pro. This will be slightly cheaper and quicker.

No, not usually. On some occasions our sales team can give out a free trial of Pro, but we believe that the value of our subscription model speaks for itself. We recommend booking an Advice Session or a Legal Concierge™ service if you want to get a feel for using Goodlawyer before signing up for Pro.