Many lawyers and legal researchers keep a mental note to look out for new regulations under specific Acts or new proclamations bringing into force an Act of interest. As Shaunna Mireau pointed out in this October 2011 tip though, if you’re only keeping an eye on new issues of the relevant Gazettes, you’ll be days or even weeks behind those who are also keeping an eye on orders in council. Remember, most regulations, proclamations, and orders begin life as orders in council. Then, if required, the OIC is later published in either part of the Gazette. So, stay …

The novelist Graham Greene – a master of lean, mean prose – called adverbs ‘beastly’. (In spite of the -ly ending, that’s an adjective.)

Think of the adverb ‘quite’, which is either ambiguous or weak: ‘quite good’ can mean ‘better than expected’, ‘something a bit less than good’, ‘actually good’, ‘very good’. In any case, it lacks oomph.

Or indeed ‘very’, which the nineteenth-century newspaper editor William Allen White called ‘the weakest word in the English language’. Very true.

In legal writing, adverbs are often used as qualifiers or fillers. I’m thinking of words like ‘generally’, ‘clearly’, ‘unfortunately’.

In opinions, …

Most CanLII users know that CanLII provides point-in-time versions of legislation. However, one feature of CanLII that is less well known is that it allows users to compare two versions of an act.

It is straightforward to compare two versions of an act on CanLII:

1. Find the act you wish to compare the versions of.
2. Underneath the name of the act is a list of point-in-time versions of that act. Select the two versions you want to compare. (They don’t have to be consecutive.)
3. Click on COMPARE.

The older of the two acts will be on the left hand …

What do I mean by this? Pairs of words that lawyers routinely use together, but would be better not to.

These pairs may once (in the late Middle Ages?) have had distinct meanings but now really don’t.

And even in the Middle Ages they may not have: many of these ‘coupled synonyms’ (in Richard Wydick‘s phrase) join an English word with its (Old) French equivalent, in a belt-and-suspenders manoeuvre.

Like ‘free and clear’, which combines the synonymous Old English freo and the Old French cler.

Examples:

Null and void [how about ‘of no effect’?]
No force …

ChangeDetection.com is a tool I recommend to help you monitor webpages and be notified automatically if they’ve been updated. No one wants to be sitting around refreshing a web page until that important agreement gets uploaded and goes public. This tool will watch the page for you and email you when it’s updated. Being the first one to share that sort of update with a colleague or client often pays off with new work or with increased trust and respect.

If I wanted to be notified of updates to a Government of BC page listing all current agreements between them …

Just as blogs get more readers than e-mails, articles with catchy headlines and enticing openers are more likely to be looked at than, well, boring ones.

Here is a post from LinkedIn that illustrates the point:

A recent case from the ONSC clarifies the law on whether municipalities can regulate boathouses and whether the Building Code Act applies to same, finding that (i) municipalities have jurisdiction to zone Ontario lakes and apply zoning by-laws to lakes, regulating construction of boathouses and other structures; and (ii) the Building Code Act applies to such structures, where not otherwise prohibited by the by-laws …

Legal citations like to pack the largest amount of information in the smallest amount of space. However, if you are not familiar with the abbreviation for a specific law journal or reporter, it can be tricky figuring out what is being referred to from a few scant letters. Adding to the confusion is that one journal may be referred to by different abbreviations and the same abbreviation may be used for multiple law reports. (For example, does the B in B.L.R. refer to Business or Building or Burma?)

Fortunately there are a number of resources to assist in deciphering these …

My first tip is simple: get writing!

Or, more to the point, get blogging.

Blogged content has high visibility and much higher readership than content that is distributed by e-mail. Unless you have a very targeted and well-maintained e-mail distribution list, it’s unlikely that a publication sent by e-mail will be opened (much less read) by more than 5% of its recipients.

Contrast that with material that is posted on a blog, which can easily get views in the four digits. Blog posts also have the advantage of being picked up the aggregators (LinkedIn, Lexology, Mondaq, JD Supra), which widen …

I shared some tips about technology skills with some fine folks via webinar with CBA Manitoba’s Legal Research Section recently.  One of the tech skills was about noting up:

Note up cases for judicial history as well as consideration of decisions by other cases and legal commentary using multiple database sources (fee and free)

The tip was about the way to execute performing a noteup using CanLII, WestlawNext Canada and LexisNexis Quicklaw.

Melanie R. Bueckert, LL.B., LL.M., Legal Research Counsel at the Manitoba Court of Appeal offered this excellent addition:

The only thing I would have added, if we had

Today’s Tip was inspired by a news release that crossed my email:

Canadian startup launches law search engine
Legal technology puts 5 million pages of laws from around the world

(September 24, 2015, Toronto) – Canadian startup, Global-Regulation Inc., has just launched a law search engine that enables searching 225,000+ laws from the European Union, United States, Canada, China, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Ireland, Germany, Japan and other countries.

“Our software automatically translates laws into English so our users can search the world’s laws,” says Founder Addison Cameron-Huff. “Automatic translation makes the world’s laws instantly accessible to researchers,