Here’s a tip I always mention when I’m introducing students to the legal research process: you will save time if you start by consulting the leading secondary sources on your topic, rather than going straight to the legislation or case law.

Ludmila B. Herbst, Q.C., wrote the following about the importance of starting with secondary sources in her 2006 CLE BC course paper “Effective Legal Research”:

A vast array of material is available in which authors (both learned and not so learned) have assembled and synthesized the case law and statutory materials applicable to particular issues. Make use

You’ve drafted a client piece – now what?

Heed the words of Samuel Johnson:  ‘What is written without effort is generally read without pleasure.’

In other words, go back and edit; your text could always use some polishing.

Here are some specific tips.

• sleep on it – you will spot things the next morning that were not apparent the night before, especially if the midnight oil was burning (typos, spelling and grammar errors, stylistic things)
• get a second opinion – this will help with correctness, readability, errors you just aren’t seeing because you’re too familiar with your text (even after

Although most acts have a definitions section, usually at the beginning of the act, it is logistically impossible for an act to define all the words and terms it uses. If you are trying to find the meaning of a term that isn’t defined in an act, check that jurisdiction’s Interpretation Act. Definitions of terms that are used by multiple acts are quite often found in this act. For example, terms defined in the federal Interpretation Act include “herein”, “holiday” and “oath”. You will find Interpretation Acts in federal and all provincial legislation.

Interpretation acts are also useful when …

 Since you asked…

Baffled on Bay Street wonders: What’s with ‘Esquire’? Does it have some special meaning in law?

In mediaeval England, an esquire was one rank above a gentleman and one below a knight; hence the variant ‘squire’ for a trainee knight.

While the precise class of chaps eligible to be an esquire is a matter of intense historical controversy, it seems that you had to be the younger son of a nobleman, the son or grandson of a knight, or an office-holder (possibly including a barrister-at-law). By the 18th century, ‘Esquire’ came to be used as a polite …

A short tip today to remind you that you can deep link to a specific paragraph for most judgments on CanLII. This is helpful when you want to bring a colleague’s attention to specific paragraphs in a judgment.

Each decision on CanLII has a permanent URL, which will look like this:

http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2016/2016scc18/2016scc18.html

To create a link directly to paragraph 21 of this decision, just add #par21 after this permanent URL. The link to paragraph 21 of the decision would look like this:

http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2016/2016scc18/2016scc18.html#par21

I often use this when I’m sending a list of relevant case law to a colleague and …

By this, I don’t mean where partners spend their week-ends. Instead, I have horrors like these in mind:

herein

therein

wherein

hereinafter

thereinafter

heretofore

herewith

therewith

aforementioned [or (shudder) its bastard progeny, ‘above-referenced’]

thereof

thereto

whereas

whereof

whereupon

hitherto

inasmuch as

notwithstanding

As Richard Wydick puts it, these words ‘give writing a legal smell, but they carry little or no legal substance. When they are used in writing addressed to non-lawyers, they baffle and annoy. When used in other legal writing, they give a false sense of precision and sometimes obscure a dangerous gap in analysis’ (Plain …

Certain questions come up time and time again. You can save time by keeping a list of the most frequently asked questions and their answers; each time one of the questions on the list gets asked you can just cut and paste the answer.

FAQs can also work as a knowledge management tool. Although you may answer certain questions frequently, other staff members may not. One solution is to have these questions and answers saved centrally so they are accessible to all library staff.

To get even more bang for your buck, put these questions and answers on your intranet …

The law, for starters – but there is a bit more to it than that.

Here are some suggestions, adapted from the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Guide to Business Development for Women Lawyers (January 2013). They are equally applicable to men.

• Choose your topic carefully
  • write about something you actually practise, know about or want to develop as an area of specialisation
  • you don’t want people to think you’re an expert on the basis of one article
• Recycle old work
  • a memo for a file could be the basis of a client piece
  • but be careful to remove any

My sincere thanks to my fellow law librarian Diane Crossley, and to the judicial staff at the BC Superior Law Courts for collaborating with me on this column.

In a recent tip about what’s on CanLII, we learned that “Most routine matters aren’t written up in decisions, so the information related to them is not generally publicly available online. This means that the information available on CanLII (or any source of caselaw) for subjects like sentencing is mostly for unusual matters and outcomes.”

In today’s tip, you’ll learn more about when and how criminal conviction and sentencing decisions are made …

The infinitive of a verb is the form with ‘to’ in front of it. As in, to be or not to be.

A split infinitive is a verb in this form, but with something stuck between to and the main bit: to not be, by way of example.

People (OK, grammar nerds) have been getting their knickers in a twist about split infinitives for ages.

Writing back in 1926, H.W. Fowler divided the world into (1) those who neither know nor care about split infinitives, (2) those who don’t really know what they are, but think they’re bad, …