WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Added: 2026-06-08

[00:00:00]So for today's video, I'll continue on the theme of yesterday's video, which was where I was talking about interesting procedural exceptions that you would become aware of if you're a lawyer working on similar cases over and over again for years and years. And in the last video, one of the things that I emphasized was that if you're really crafty, you could build up a basket of these learned procedural exceptions and loopholes over time. And eventually, you'd get really good at leveraging those to your favor. And for today's video, I want to focus in on a legal term known as without prejudice. And this term means something very specific in law, and since I'm not a lawyer, I won't try to exhaustively define it for you. But as far as I understand it, the gist of this term is basically that you put this on documents when you want whatever you say in that document to be considered kind of like off the record in the context of financial negotiations or contract negotiations. And the best example that I can give is when this term was used on some documents when they made the initial offer to get people to move out early for $6,000. And in my understanding, the major advantage of putting this without prejudice clause on any kind of offers that you make is that it prevents any details in those offers from becoming legally binding or being potentially used against you in the future. So for example, in my case, when the landlord did an N13 eviction against the tenants, they were legally obligated to give the tenants at least $3,000 or so compensation, something like 3 months rent. But in these they gave out, they put $6,000 in the hopes that people would just take that immediately and move out. And the reason they put that without prejudice clause on there is because they don't want the $6,000 offer to become legally binding. They just want that to be an informal offer. And in a lot of ways, I think this concept makes sense because you might want to do an informal negotiation and maybe haggle with people to you know, try and arrive at a solution uh works for both of you. And if you're just doing some off-the-record haggling, there could be some miscommunications or something. Now, here's the interesting uh loophole or procedural exception or whatever you want to call it that I want to convey in this video. So, during our N13 merits eviction hearing, we had uh a piece of what I thought was very strong evidence from a tenant in the building.

[00:02:16]And this tenant apparently had a recording of a conversation with uh representative of the landlord. And apparently, this person who was working for the landlord uh admitted to this tenant that if they just paid a little bit more money, the N13 would magically disappear. And the actual physical need to do this supposed uh extensive renovations to, you know, fix the plumbing or something like that, that this was basically bogus and it that didn't actually need to be done. Because obviously, if the tenant just pays a little bit more money, that doesn't uh fix whatever supposed issues were existing in the plumbing. Because they also said that they could just stay in their apartment. Now, during the hearing, our side attempted to present this evidence.

[00:02:58]And one of the things that I didn't initially realize is that there are some very tight rules at the tenant board uh around the uh privilege with respect to uh settlement negotiation. And there's a lot of rules around how settlement negotiations uh cannot be entered into evidence. And since the context of this conversation where they admitted that the uh basis for the supposed renovations was basically bogus, since that conversation took place within the context of a uh settlement negotiation, an oral settlement negotiation, uh with that tenant, the adjudicator felt that it was not necessarily appropriate to admit that piece of evidence. And I don't know all of the details of that conversation that took place uh between the landlord and the tenant uh because I didn't actually hear it presented. I just heard the meta discussion about, you know, whether this would even be uh admissible. And in the end, the adjudicator said that uh he would not hear this evidence and he would not listen to the testimony uh of the witness. Now, in this case, I think the adjudicator was just airing on the side of caution and in the end it didn't really matter anyway because we had lots more much stronger evidence. But assuming that I've properly understood all of the nuances of this particular rule, this brings up a lot of interesting questions about what kinds of evidence you can get disqualified from being admitted in the case if you can somehow tie that evidence to a settlement negotiation. And I could imagine a scenario where as a landlord, you could admit to doing all sorts of really bad or illegal things that would otherwise make you lose your case at the tenant board, but if you can somehow tie all of the evidence of that bad behavior to a settlement negotiation, then you can have that evidence not be admissible against you. And since I'm not a lawyer, I'm not really sure how far you could push this. And I'm also pretty sure that there are a number of different nuances with the Ontario Tenant Board specifically with respect to the admissibility of evidence in settlement negotiations. So, everything that I'm saying in this video would vary substantially between different jurisdictions and different courts. Anyway, that'll be it for today's video and if you're a landlord, hopefully you've learned some new strategies to rip people off.

[00:05:15]>> [snorts]