We are a Canadian retired couple who sought a legal opinion from Alina Nikolaeva / Grandville Law Group with respect to our potential repatriation back to Canada. The entire process was a waste of time and money and we definitely would not recommend her legal services.

We sent an initial email to Ms. Nikolaeva asking if she provided such legal services. She assured us she could help and then charged us $200 (0.5 hr) to reply to our inquiry email (she wrote 3 sentences with 7 bullet points with no legal work). Her written response was littered with “I don’t think it will be a problem” or “it should not be a problem” indicating a concerning lack of conviction. Additionally, English is her 2nd language and written responses contained spelling/grammar errors. The certainly did not instill confidence.

We arranged for a telephone conversation and provided her with a detailed email description of our offshore history and our specific questions/concerns. The questions were of a general BC tax/Canada CRA tax nature and very easily answered by a competent tax lawyer. Her written responses to this email were disjointed and she spoke of issues we did not even ask about (eg. she went into detail about the BC provincial property transfer tax when we were fully aware anyone who purchases a property in BC is required to pay the property transfer tax). The fee for this email from her was $520 (1.3 hrs).

We had a 15 minute phone call to confirm her written responses in her email. During his call, she told us incorrect information about purchasing a home (twice she told us we fell under the “Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Non-Canadians Act” and would not be able to purchase property). We knew this was incorrect and following the phone call we immediately emailed her information indicating this did not apply to us. She subsequently emailed us confirming she was incorrect and billed 0.8 hrs; 0.25 hrs for the 15 minute call and 0.55 hrs for her to “research” her incorrect answer to us!

It appeared to us during the entire process that Ms. Nikolaeva either does not have a full understanding of basic repatriation tax law or she purposefully indicates she needs to “research” common questions to increase her billing. We walked away with no additional information we could have received using Artificial Intelligence and the questions we did not get answered were obtained using another tax lawyer.

Alina Nikolaeva

Send an email to Alina Nikolaeva:

Customer Reviews

Be the first to review this lawyer.

Information

Rates