This is one of those words with a weird function confined largely to the world of law.

The ordinary current meaning of deem, according to the OED is, essentially, to consider, think or judge (in a non-judicial way).

But lawyers have a special meaning, where deeming means treating A as if it were B and not A. Creating a legal fiction, in other words (and that doesn’t mean John Grisham).

This comes up in my teaching, where the law school will occasionally stick a deemed Wednesday in the calendar, in order to make up for an actual Wednesday sacrificed …

When you are trying to find a source that has been cited online, it can be very frustrating to discover that the link no longer works. If you are looking for a website cited in a Supreme Court of Canada judgment, you’ll be happy to know that the Office of the Registrar of the SCC has archived the content of the majority of the online sources cited by the Court between 1998 and 2016. 

For 2017 on, any online source that was cited in the “Authors Cited” section in SCC judgments has been captured and archived. When a judgment …

A certain orange person to the south of us uses these a lot (Sad!).

You would probably never see one in a contract, but you might in a factum – but there only rarely, and, one hopes, judiciously.

Over-use of the exclamation mark is a hallmark of the uneducated or unpractised writer, says Fowler.

Experienced writers will confine them to:

• interjections (Damn! Heavens! Oh!)
• exclamations with what or how (What a disaster! How awful!)
• wishes (Convention be damned!)
• ellipses and inversions expressing emotion (If only I could! Fat lot of good

These pomposities can always be replaced by something simpler and clearer.

Inasmuch as is just a fancy (and archaic) way of saying seeing that, since or because.

In so far as (sometimes insofar as) means much the same thing, or to the extent that.

They add nothing to your prose except flab (as does to the extent that).

Rephrase.

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)…

The origins of this phrase are a little obscure, but appear to be from the exhortation of sports coaches or more senior people in the army for the players/troops to look up from whatever is distracting them from the game/drill/war. (Their mobile devices, perhaps?)

Be on the alert or on the qui vive, in other words. There may also originally have been an element of buck up! to it.

Fair enough. But at some point people in business and government started talking about giving their underlings a heads-up [note the hyphen for the noun] – to the point now …

At work we are frequently asked how to cite a source using the McGill Guide. While most questions are fairly easy (“how do I cite Delgamuukw?”) the McGill Guide doesn’t always have an answer, e.g. “how do I cite an unreported tribunal decision?” or “how do I cite a type of government document [that isn’t listed in McGill]?” 

It can be helpful to search CanLII (or other case law database) to see if the source we are trying to find a citation for has been already been referred to. If it has, we can just copy the citation (or …

Alternate/alternative

As a verb, alternate means ‘to succeed in alternation’ (The two speakers alternated in answering questions form the audience); as a noun, ‘a substitute (I can’t attend the conference, but we’re allowed to send an alternate); as an adjective, ‘occurring by turns’ (The cake consists of alternate layers of cake, whipped cream and fruit filling)

Alternative involves a choice between two options: An alternative choice to cake is fresh fruit.

Forceful/forcible

Forceful means ‘powerful, effective’; forcible is ‘using force or violence’.

The lawyer made a forceful plea for clemency on behalf of …

Judicious use of repetition can be a very effective rhetorical device, especially in written and oral advocacy. Judicious use, mind you.

Winston Churchill made memorable use of repetition: We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.

Lawyerly writing, on the other hand, tends to repeat things because the writer doesn’t want to allow an iota of uncertainty by substituting a pronoun like it or that, or a synonym – or because the writer hasn’t taken the time …

This doesn’t exactly count as legal research, but I periodically get asked for to confirm that a given person was the source of a quote. Most of the time, it’s fairly easy to track down, but in other cases, I end up using https://quoteinvestigator.com. It’s a wonderful resource for those situations where the quote you’ve been given might have been said by a number of different people and not in those precise words. Note that you will need to scroll down a little bit before you find the search box on the left hand side.

— Susannah Tredwell

…

Deck
Can you flip me the deck?

No, but I’ll happily send you the slides.

Page-flip
When people talk about doing a page-flip through a document, it always make me think it will be a superficial job.

Let’s be less casual, more thorough and less jargon-y: read, review or go through that document.

Skill up
Using skill as a verb is unobjectionable in constructions involving its past participle, skilled: Nancy is a skilled practitioner of municipal law.

But that’s really the only verb form you should be using. Don’t skill up; instead, be trained, get …