The Workplace Safety and Insurance Appeals Tribunal (WSIAT) has published a detailed tip sheet on finding WSIAT decisions online.

It explains how to search by topic, issue, words or phrases and more. Step-by-step instructions are provided for searching by WSIB policy number, section of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act, and with summaries.

Instructions are for CanLII but also cover the “Noteworthy Decisions” section of the Tribunal’s website.

Hat tip to the Ontario Ministry of Labour, Training and Skills Development What’s New newsletter for highlighting this resource.…

Ontario now allows legal professionals to search for Superior Court of Justice court cases online. To search, you will need to set up a ONe-key account. (There is no cost to set up an account.)

You can search by either party name (i.e. surname or business name) or by case number.

Information provided includes the parties, the name of the lawyer representing the person or company (if represented), the claim amount (for civil matters), the date the case was opened, the most recent order type and date (for civil matters), the next appearance type and date (if a …

You may have seen that the US District Court for the District of Columbia has issued guidance (it isn’t framed as a directive, exactly) on its preferences for typefaces in documents submitted to the court.

Briefs (as they call them in the USA) must be at least 14-point in size (judges tend to be older, and presumably need large-print formats), and in a font with serifs. (Oddly the court’s notice is in a sans serif typeface.)

The court then goes on to say it has ‘determined that certain typefaces, such as Century and Times New Roman, are more legible than …

If you’re a power Lexbox user, you’ll be interested to know that Lexbox Premium is now available. The premium account includes:

• integration with Clio
• 5GB of uploads storage (or even more: 20GB for an additional fee)
• up to 100 alert feeds (or even more: 400 extra alerts for an additional fee)
• unlimited history, hyperlinking of your docs to primary law, and search within your docs

See a comparison between Base (free) accounts and Premium accounts here.  The Premium account is $20/month and is billed monthly.

It’s also important to note that “all revenues generated are kept within the …

The meanings of words change over time.

A nice example is condescending, which not so long ago meant something along the lines of ‘being gracious to the underlings’ (the King James Bible, Dr Johnson and Lord Byron use it in this sense). Since the later nineteenth century, it has meant ‘patronising’ (in a bad way; that also once had a neutral or even positive connotation).

Another is meticulous, a quality we now seek in new legal hires, but a word which used to mean ‘timid’ or ‘fearful’ rather than ‘detail-oriented’.

Only a pedant would cling to the old …

Lexbox is a free* online service that allows you to set up CanLII alerts that are automatically emailed to you.

To set up an alert on CanLII using Lexbox:

• If you haven’t already done so, create a Lexbox account.
• Go to CanLII and run your search.
• Once you are happy with the search, click on the grey Set up alert feed button. If you’re not already logged in, it will prompt you to do so.
• A box with the details of your alert should pop up. You can rename your search and choose how often you wish to

To do one’s utmost is to make the maximum possible effort: We will do our utmost to meet the deadline imposed by the regulator.

What one sometimes sees (or, more often, hears) is upmost instead of utmost. Close, but no cigar.

Upmost is a legitimate word, but it’s obsolescent in its correct sense. It refers to something that occupies the highest place or most important position.

The more common word for that is now uppermost. As in, The reader’s convenience was not uppermost in the mind of the drafter of these complicated regulations. Or, The book was on …

Some random things I’ve seen and heard lately.

Don’t take it personal
Nope. Personally is how one should (or should not) take it.

You would make it personal, however, because you want an adjective to modify it (not the adverb that needs to modify take).

Happy New Years
Add this to the category of Apostrophe Catastrophes.™

It’s New Year’s Eve, but you express wishes for the New Year (whether happy or otherwise).

You could omit the capitals where the reference is general, not specific to the first day of January or in a greeting: I’ll see you …

When people hear I’ve published a book on writing, many of them ask for my views on the ‘Oxford’ or ’serial’ comma, in that intense ‘please confirm my own view’ sort of way.

The Oxford comma, so called because the University Press has long insisted on it, is used in lists: A, B, and C. Whether one needs the comma before the and is apparently one of the great punctuation controversies of our time.

Clinging to the Oxford comma seems to be a badge of honour for some, a beacon of erudition in a barbarous age. I’ve even …

This was adapted from a post on the CALL listserv; many thanks to Sarah Sutherland of CanLII and Ken Fox of the Law Society of Saskatchewan for the information.

There are a couple of ways of noting up a specific paragraph of a case, with the easiest option being on CanLII.

For CanLII, start off by searching for the case you are interested in. Then scroll down to the paragraph and look at the text box to its right. The number in the box will give the number of times the paragraph has been cited. If you then click …