Baked in
This is (regrettably) now used to mean something like integral.

Does it have its origin in that vacuous remark by the sometime MP Belinda Stronach about baking ‘a bigger economic pie’ (whatever that was intended to mean)? I don’t know, but please stop talking about things being baked in; you’re a lawyer, not a baker.

C Suite
This was once, I suppose, a fresh way to describe senior management at a company. It is now past its sell-by date.

Flip
Not as in flip your lid but rather flip me an e-mail.

I’ve never liked …

I forget where we are in the series. Part 8? Anyway…

Avert/advert
One averts one’s gaze from something unpleasant; one adverts (turns one’s attention) to other matters. The two have been confused since the Middle Ages.

Forgone/foregone
My friend Ross Guberman has noted Warren Buffet’s confusion of these two words: the Sage of Omaha wrote to this followers that ‘Investing is an activity in which consumption today is foregone in an attempt to allow greater consumption at a later date’.

A nicely expressed observation, but for the error; Buffet means forgone (‘relinquished’, ‘given up’) not foregone (‘preceding’, as in foregone …

There are many reasons to pity Melania Trump (although maybe she knew what she was signing up for and got what she deserved – hard to say, really).

Mrs T got into some linguistic hot water with the slogan for her campaign for children’s health and happiness, launched in May 2018: Be Best.

As Tim Hill has pointed out in The Guardian, this doesn’t hold up to what he calls ‘the laws of English grammar’ (I’d soften that a bit and call them rules; English is more flexible than laws would suggest).

One can be good and …

Summons is one of those odd nouns that ends in –s in its singular form; so the plural is summonses.

Odder still is the use of summons as a verb, meaning to command someone’s appearance in a court of law by way of a summons. Verbs don’t typically end in –s either.

Not everyone is happy with this state of affairs: Glanville Williams wrote in Learning the Law, 11th ed. (1982) that ‘the horrible expression “summonsed for an offence” (turning the noun “summons” into a verb) has now become accepted usage, but “summoned” remains not only …

A very quick tip today: if you’re trying to print out a readable version of a web page, but the website doesn’t provide the content in a print friendly format, try using https://www.printfriendly.com to remove any extraneous information.…

Let’s talk about Legal Information Institutes (LIIs). Every Canadian legal researcher knows about CanLII (I least we hope you do). But there is also LII (that’s the USA one), BaiLII (Britain and Ireland), AustLII (Australasia), AsianLII, HKLII (Hong Kong), PacLII (Pacific Islands), SAFLII (Southern Africa), WorldLII, and many others, all of which are part of the larger Access to Law Movement.

LIIs provide free access to current, primary law in their jurisdiction. But they do not always contain comprehensive collections of historic materials (in all cases, I assume, they are working on it). In the English-speaking world, …

A regrettably continuing series.

Core
Almost as bad as key (when used, like core, as an adjective meaning ‘principal’ or ‘main’). Both have a distinct whiff of the 1990s to them.

My gut
Please, no one wants to imagine what your digestive tract is doing – much less what it is telling you.

Next steps
For the love of pity, can we stop talking about these at the end of every meeting? It’s not as though we can take previous steps at that point.

Action items would not be an acceptable substitute; it’s another piece of jargon. Tasks would …

Administrator’s note: thanks to Wendy Reynolds, Manager, Accessibility, Records and Open Parliament at the Information Services Branch, Legislative Assembly of Ontario for this guest tip!

Libraries track reference questions for many reasons. Primarily, we capture information about transactions – who we did work for, how long it took, and how difficult it was. A simple spreadsheet or piece of paper on the ref desk will suffice for this most common kind of tracking.

Some libraries go beyond the transactional. My employer, for example, relies on an Oracle database to collect questions, triage work, and record the answers sent to clients. …

If you are carrying out due diligence on an individual or company, the BC Securities Commission has produced a very useful online resource on the subject called Conducting Background Research. The guide does note that there is “no set template for a good background search. … You will need to use your judgment for each research decision, including the choice of sources to search and research strategies to employ.”

— Susannah Tredwell…

In the first year of law school, students pick up many bad writing habits. Perhaps the chief of these is to use previously unfamiliar phrases that have a (specious) lawyerly appearance.

An example is at first blush, which is not commonly used outside the law; and because it’s used so much within it, it ought to be avoided as an over-used cliché. You could just write at first, without the blushing (‘This case seems, at first, to be uncomplicated …’)

On its face has a venerable legal pedigree (at least as far back as 1632, according to the …