A reader’s suggestion, this. Good idea, even though it’s more of a contractual drafting or opinions point than a general legal writing tip.

Shall, will and must
The difference is to a large extent idiomatic – that is, subject more to instinct and feel than hard-and-fast grammatical rules. Usage has also changed over the centuries, and varies between North America and Britain. What follows is a distillation, as best I can manage.

In classic usage, shall is used in the first person (I, we) to indicate a wish or ‘mere futurity’. To say I will or …

In training sessions we always advise articling students to start off their research using secondary sources. While there are instances where it is appropriate to start off research by searching case law and legislation, using secondary sources generally is far more time-efficient since it usually tells you what the relevant legislation and leading cases are. However once you’ve found a reference to a case that appears to be on point, you should not just rely on the summary, but actually read the case. We’ve run into more than one instance where the summary said something quite different from what the …

First off, the verb is quote and the noun really should be quotation – but I would be fighting a pointless rearguard action in trying to stop people from talking about a quote.

Single and double quotation marks
In the UK, single quotation marks (usually called ‘inverted commas’) are the default, with anything quoted within a quotation going in double quotation marks, like so: She said, ‘The bus driver told me, “You can’t bring such a large animal onto the bus, madam”, but in the end he let me.’

In the US, the position is reversed: double quotation marks …

This is part 2 of a series on questions you should ask about any electronic research source.  See part 1 of this series here.

2. What constitutes a RECORD?

What are the individual things the database consists of?

Some case law databases, like Saskatchewan Cases or the Canadian Abridgment, consist of summaries or digests. Others, like CanLII, consist of primary law – judgments and legislation. In others, such as the case law components of Quicklaw and WestlawNext, you can search a combination of summaries and full-text documents. Knowing if you are searching a short summary or full-text decision is …

Openings and closing of business correspondence, that is.

My father, an old-fashioned lawyer if there ever was one, once said there are only two ways to start and close a business letter: either Dear Sir/Yours faithfully or Dear Mr So-and-so/Yours truly, depending on one’s level of acquaintance with the recipient. (And not very truly: one is true or one is not, no more no less.)

There is a certain simplicity to that, and it can be made female-friendly without difficulty. My own views follow.

Beginnings
Younger folk appear to have this strange view that …

One difficulty with finding labour arbitration decisions is a lack of uniformity in the style of cause; sometimes the union’s name may be fully spelled out, other times it may be abbreviated, or it may be omitted altogether and the name of the griever used. As a result, it can be faster to find a decision by searching by arbitrator’s name and the dates rather than the party names.

CanLII, Quicklaw and WestlawNext all carry labour arbitration decisions, although their coverage varies. You can find them in the following databases:

CanLII

• Federal Labour Arbitration Awards (incomplete coverage from 1989 on)

Oh, so many of these – but I’ll mention just a few (for now).

Can not
No. It’s one word in modern English: cannot. And when you say it, the emphasis is generally on the first syllable.

Sometime
Spell-check thinks this always has to be one word. It doesn’t. As a single word, it means ‘former’: Bob Sharpe, sometime dean of law at U. of T., is now on the Ontario Court of Appeal. But Let’s have coffee some time and At some time in the future, we’ll see … (I acknowledge, however, that current usage may be against …

Whenever you set out to use any electronic research source, be it a public web search or a specialized database, there are a few questions you should always ask – four to be exact. You may say there are really five or six important questions, or maybe you think there are only three, and that’s ok. But for me, not three but four is the magic number.

So here are my four questions you should always ask, with examples drawn from some of our favourite databases.

1. What is the SCOPE of the database?

Or what is its reach? How …

This week, you get a full colonic!

Sorry, couldn’t resist that.

Actually, full treatment of this subject is beyond the scope of a brief piece, but here are some basics.

The colon (:)
The colon is most frequently used to introduce a list of items, but it can often be omitted. There is no need for a colon in the following sentence:

The syndicate of lenders consists of: Bank of Montreal, Bank of Nova Scotia and TD.

The colon is correctly used after the word ‘sentence’ just before the example; it introduces what is to follow, where that doesn’t …

This article was originally published in the November 2016 edition of Wired West.

At the recent 2016 SLA conference in Philadelphia, one of the most popular sessions was Hidden Treasures: Mastering Grey Literature. This session was co-sponsored by the Science-Technology Division, the Social Science Division, and the Taxonomy Division. A panel of speakers from institutions such as Cornell University and the Canadian Library of Parliament spoke about their favourite sources for grey literature. Inspired by that presentation, we have assembled here a very Canadian primer on grey literature.

For the uninitiated, Wikipedia offers a very accessible definition for this …