HeinOnline is a popular full-text journal database available in the Law Society Library’s Members’ Section. Your firm’s library may also have a subscription.

Did you know that HeinOnline has an excellent blog?  Here are some recent research tips from their blog:

• Five Things You Can Do in Less Than 15 Seconds in HeinOnline
• Primary Sources, Secondary Sources and Beyond
• Comprehensive Search Results in HeinOnline Just Got Better
• Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals: Did You Know…?
• HeinOnline: Where Books Rule

We encourage you to consider subscribing to HeinOnline’s blog!

[This tip by Alan Kilpatrick originally appeared on the Law Society …

A short primer on what is called ‘point first’ writing.

You might be tempted to keep your reader in suspense about your conclusion or even the very subject of your blog post or client update, but that would be a mistake – you aren’t aiming to write a mystery novel or a cliff-hanging thriller.

Like most people, your client is busy and has a short attention span – so get to the point.

Point-first writing is also effective in memos, factums and letters.

Start with your conclusion and then explain how you got there. Begin by expressing the general rule, …

Searches that look for all variations of a word can be helpful, but sometimes you need to search for a word or phrase exactly as spelled.

How you do this differs from database to database. In CanLII, use EXACT( ) around the word you are searching for, e.g. EXACT(AIDS). CanLII usually searches for variants of the word, but using EXACT will force it to search for exactly what you have specified.

Quicklaw and WestlawNext Canada both default to searching for both the singular and plural of a search term, rather than all the variants; this means you won’t get …

With pronouns, that is.

A pronoun is a word that stands for a noun. Example: ‘The guy [noun] I was talking to is a third-year associate; he [pronoun] works in the corporate department’.

That and who
These pronouns have distinct uses: that refers to things and who to people.

So don’t write this: ‘Thanks to all that came to the event’. It’s ‘all who came to the event’ (unless they were robots).

An entity is an it
Not a they. Thus, ‘The bank was subject to a class action alleging that it had overcharged its customers for foreign-exchange …

Did you know that the Canadian Bar Association publishes toolkits in multiple practice areas? Today I want to tell you in particular about the Child Rights Toolkit that was launched just May 11 of this year.

This toolkit describes its four main parts as:

Fundamentals – provides the fundamental framework of child rights including where they come from, what they are, who is responsible and the status of child rights in Canada.

The System: Cross-Cutting Themes – outlines available systemic child rights supports and tools and in particular independent human rights institutions and child rights impact assessments.

The Child:

This is intended mostly for the baby-boomers out there.

If you’re writing a client piece, it’s often tempting to jazz things up with a reference to sports, popular music, TV or movies.

This can be effective, both in conveying an image and in making the writer look human (which isn’t always easy in legal writing). There are some pitfalls, however.

Those born before 1965 may have to come to the shocking realisation that there is a now a generation for whom The Beatles are just some old band their grandparents bore on about.

Trying to look hip can also backfire, …

If you’re having difficulty finding the amendments made to an act by another act, make sure you’re consulting the original act rather than the consolidation. Consolidations generally omit amendments to other acts.

For example, the new British Columbia Societies Act made changes to a number of acts including the Business Corporations Act. If you wanted to see the text of those changes, you would need to look at the text of the Societies Act as it read initially rather than in its consolidated form.

— Susannah Tredwell…

Bi–
H.W. Fowler refers in Modern English Usage to the ‘misshapen brood’ of bi– words that are used to describe the frequency of intervals: biannual, bi-monthly, bi-weekly and the like.

The problem with them is that they are ambiguous: bi-weekly, for example, can mean either twice a week or every two weeks. At least a biennial (like the Biennale art exhibition held in Venice) is always held every two years, not twice in one.

Careful drafters of contracts will obviously want to make things perfectly clear, especially when dealing with dates of payment obligations and …

Did you know that the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) website provides a wealth of free practice resources?  We encourage you to check it out!

Here is a break down of the amazing resources provided by the CBA:

• Practice Tools
  CBA’s Practice Tools feature a broad selection of online guides covering child rights, tax law, and legal ethics.  For example, check out the Child Rights Toolkit.
• Practice Link
  CBA’s Practice Links focus on work/life balance, mental health, and networking skills for legal professionals.  For example, check out Got Stress? What to Do Before the Burnout Hits.
• Sections and Forums

Feeling respect and regard for your readers is important, but this edition is more specifically about words and phrases derived from respect and regard.

Regard and derivatives
First, regards as opposed to regard.

Regards are what you express, typically at the end of a letter or e-mail, in order to sound friendly; but as your humble scribe has previously said, you could usefully dispense with them altogether – they add nothing (see ‘Beginnings and endings‘).

In any event, do NOT say with regards to or in regards to. Here, the correct word is regard…