The envelope arrived at Apex Foundation Works Ltd. on a grey Tuesday morning in late October, delivered by a process server who waited at the reception desk until someone signed for it. Inside was a thick bundle of documents: a statement of claim naming Ridgewood Community Services Society as plaintiff and Hartland General Contracting Inc. as defendant, followed by a third party notice naming Apex as the third party. The claim alleged that structural deficiencies and water infiltration at the Ridgewood facility had caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, disrupted programming for vulnerable populations, and required extensive remediation. The third party notice, filed by Hartland, alleged that if Hartland was liable to Ridgewood for any of these damages, then Apex was liable to Hartland for contribution and indemnity because Apex had performed the foundation work that allegedly caused or contributed to the problems. Marcus Chen, the owner of Apex Foundation Works, sat in his cramped office reading the documents three times before calling his lawyer. He had completed the foundation work on the Ridgewood project more than five years earlier, had been paid in full, had never received any complaint from Hartland or anyone else about the quality of his work, and had assumed the project was long finished and forgotten. Now he found himself pulled into litigation he had not known existed, facing allegations he believed were baseless, and confronting a thicket of procedural and substantive questions about what exactly he was required to do and what rights he possessed to defend himself.