John Laskin, late of the Ontario Court of Appeal, suggests in his ‘Forget the Wind-up and Make the Pitch’, that although ‘this advice may cause mutiny among lawyers and judges’, you should avoid writing sentences containing ‘The fact that …’

It’s much more effective just to state the fact, rather than to state the fact that the fact is a fact. So, not ‘The fact that my client has accepted your offer ..’ but ‘My client’s acceptance of your offer …’ The latter is direct, clear, less wordy.

Similarly, eschew notwithstanding the fact that in favour of the …

WestlawNext Canada includes an excellent Citing References tool. Today’s tip will help you in situations where you are dealing with a long list of citing references for a major case. My example relates to evidence law, but the technique will work with any legal topic.

I’ve recently learned that the law of evidence mostly originates in criminal law, and is transplanted, as needed, to civil law. Thus, most of the citations in Cudmore’s Civil Evidence Handbook are criminal cases. So, if you are a civil litigator, you may wonder from time to time how a criminal law authority on evidence …

For anyone looking a good guide to legal research, Catherine Best’s “Best Guide to Canadian Legal Research” has been updated by a team of legal research experts (Melanie Bueckert, André Clair, Maryvon Côté, Yasmin Khan and Mandy Ostick) and added to CanLII’s commentary section.

The revised Canadian Legal Research and Writing Guide is divided up into 13 sections (including “Step-By-Step Legal Research Process”, “Use Commentary to Define and Understand the Issues”, “Guidelines for Online Research”, “Researching Canadian Federal and Provincial Legislation”, “Searching Canadian Case Law”, “Stare Decisis and Techniques of Legal Reasoning and Legal Argument”, “Preparing a Legal Memorandum”, and …

As I’ve suggested previously, odds are if you insert the word clearly in your sentence you are trying to impose clarity on something that isn’t clear at all. If something really is clear, you don’t need to say so.

In the same vein is the phrase highly anticipated (‘This highly anticipated decision from …’; ‘The release of the OSC’s highly anticipated rule on …’). The phrase gets used a lot: according to Slaw’s Canadian Law Blogs Search Engine, it occurs approximately 5,080,000 times in Canadian blog posts.

That sure sounds like over-use – or, in other words, a reason …

Not a question that arises in connection with drafting a contract or pleadings (one hopes), but certainly in composing e-mail.

Both are recognised forms.

On the traditional assumption that the expression was originally shorthand for all correct (rendered in humorous, dialectical or unschooled US English as oll (or orl) korrect), OK has the merit of being closer to the source.

There is something fishy-sounding about that etymology, I’ve always thought, but the OED and Fowler repeat it. The latter gives some other possible origins and a case reference to Nippon Menkwa Kabushiki Kaisha (Japan Cotton Trading Co Ltd) …

We’ve covered bad business jargon in this space, but other fields of endeavour are guilty of polluting the language with their specialist lingo.

Human resources (itself a piece of HR jargon; it used to be personnel or, in a more sexist age, manpower) comes to mind. Here are some examples of HR jargon to avoid; there are many more.

Diverse
Americans often refer to a diverse attorney when they want to describe a lawyer (as we would typically say in Canada) from a background that is other than white, male, straight, middle class. But in a room full of …

While some acts come into force on Royal Assent, many require Proclamation or an Order in Council to do so. A number of provinces publish tables that let you see if a specific act has been proclaimed.

Federal: Go to LEGISinfo, find your act and then click on the link for Coming into Force information. You can also check the Table of Public Statutes and Responsible Ministers which lists all the coming into force information for the consolidated version of an act.

Alberta: Check Recent Proclamations and the Alberta Gazette, Part I (use the Proclamations section of the Table …

LinkedIn helpfully provides readymade comments on the updates that your connections post there. If your colleague Luisa has a new job, you can just click on a button below her update to post an immediate Congrats Luisa.

That should be Congrats, Luisa, however. To get technical, this is a vocative construction that traditionally requires a comma before the name of the person being addressed. Similarly, it should be Thanks, Denis and Hello, Yolanda.

In modern professional correspondence by e-mail (or LinkedIn posting), the vocative comma is rarely seen. I suppose I can live with that in the …

Did you know that the Gallop Portal (Government and Legislative Libraries Online Publications Portal) provides free and convenient access to almost 500,000 electronic government publications from all levels of Canadian government?

Launched five year ago by the Association of Parliamentary Libraries in Canada (APLIC), the portal is intended to provide Canadians with an easy way to access, connect, and interact with Canadian government resources.  Canadian Legislative and Parliamentary libraries are mandated to provide access to government documents by the Federal government’s Depository Services Program.

APLIC describes the portal as a “one-stop access point” to government publications.  Users can search for …

In the distant past, lawyers used to send printed client updates by mail. Those days are long gone. Then came e-mail, rapidly reaching the saturation point.

You don’t want to clog up your clients’ email in-boxes more than you need to, so push things their way through a brief and punchy blog post.

Blog posts can be published on your firm’s public website and also distributed to a phenomenally big audience through aggregators of online content like Lexology, Mondaq and JD Supra.

Novice blogger? Fear not: here are some tips.

Don’t write about the law; write about how …