When looking at legislation it is sometimes helpful to know if there are similar provisions in other provinces. Rather than reading through each and every statute to check for equivalent provisions, it is much faster to use a concordance.

The trick is finding a concordance for a specific act. While concordances don’t exist for all acts, they do exist for a significant number of them. Publishers often include concordances in consolidated legislation. For example, LexisNexis’s Consolidated Canada Business Corporations Act & Commentary concords the Canada Business Corporations Act with all the provincial and territorial business corporations acts.

Concordances also exist …

Bryan Garner, editor of Black’s Law Dictionary and a legal writing expert, recently blogged on the exciting topic of when italics should be used for Latin words and phrases and when they can be in roman (plain) type. It must have been a slow day in the blogosphere.

His ‘fuzzy rule’ is that you can skip the italics when the word has become fully naturalised into English. So, ‘habeas corpus’ and ‘prima facie’, but ‘sensu stricto‘ and ‘in pari materia‘.

In a waspish mood, I left a comment on Garner’s blog, asking whether it wouldn’t be …

Doing legal research increasingly means having multiple windows and applications open. You might be referring to CanLII in one window, the CRA website in another, and that email you’re working on in a third. Some of you might even have two or three screens set up beside each other on your desk!

This new normal became 100% more efficient for me when I learned how to use the below four keyboard shortcuts to quickly marshal all my open windows. These first two shortcuts instantly resize your window to take up half of the screen and then snap it to one …

You feel nervous about publishing something, right? You should be, a bit – but don’t let it put you off.

Some things to bear in mind:

• get a partner to vet your idea and your draft, for technical accuracy
• defer to the senior person on points of law (unless you can show you’re right), but not always on stylistic matters (as an articling student, I stood my ground when a partner insisted that theirself was a word)
• check whether your firm acts for any party you’re talking about – you don’t want to say anything a client might not like

The Local Government Act, R.S.B.C. 2015, c.1, came into force on January 1, 2016. If you know that the last Revised Statutes of British Columbia were produced in 1996, this citation looks a little confusing. The explanation is that the new Local Government Act is what is known as a limited revision of an act.

British Columbia’s Statute Revision Act allows the government to produce a limited revision of a single act instead of revising all the statutes. Traditionally, British Columbia’s statutes have been revised every 15 years or so, with R.S.B.C. 1996 being the last general revision; it remains …

People have trouble with the correct use of that and which.

Writing in 1926, the grammarian H.W. Fowler said the rules are ‘an odd jumble, and plainly show that the language has not been neatly constructed by a master builder’.

Fowler advocated a fairly simple rule (and people who think about these things have largely followed it) – ‘although it would be idle to pretend that it is the practice either of most or of the best writers’ (Fowler again; if you don’t have his Modern English Usage you must buy it now).

That

• use it where the information

When we’re working with an Act that has had significant amendments passed, but not yet brought into force, I’ll often make a prospective consolidation to help our lawyers advise their clients on forward-looking strategies. Having a prospective consolidation on hand makes work more efficient and it can also reveal new implications for the amendments. I’m going to walk you through how I do this myself and share some lessons I learned along the way.

The method I use, which is described below, makes use of a blackline tool. A blackline tool is an app that compares two similar documents and …

Does the subject of your sentence do something (She said that), or is something done to the subject (That was said by her)? The first is an active construction, the second a passive one.

The active voice is much more effective. It tends to be shorter and simpler, more natural and direct, more engaging.

Lawyers, who are often accused of being verbose and overly complicated, unnatural, indirect and anything but engaging, favour passive constructions.

Which is more forceful? I love you (active) or You are loved by me (passive)? We recommend the chocolate mousse (active) or …

Since 1986 almost all federal Canadian regulations have included a Regulatory Impact Analysis Statement (RIAS) following the text of the regulation.

Why should you read the RIAS? Unlike acts, you will not find a discussion of new regulations in Hansard. The RIAS tells you what the rationale was for a given regulation and what it was expected to achieve. A RIAS is usually divided into five sections: issue and objectives; description and rationale; consultation; implementation, enforcement, and service standards; and contact information.

Another benefit of Regulatory Impact Analysis Statements is that they are written for a range of readers. …

In many ways we’d be better off without the apostrophe, judging by the frequency with which it’s incorrectly used, its functions misunderstood.

Here’s a handy guide.

Possessive

• singular possessor: John’s book
• singular possessor ending in S: James’s is preferable to James’, but both are OK; and the possessive form of many biblical and classical names traditionally leaves out the additional S (Jesus’, Claudius’)
• plural possessors: the Singhs’ house is next to the Joneses’ house [not the Jones’ house – or, heaven forfend, the Jone’s – but the Jones house (non-possessive) would be fine (see ‘Is it