We’ve had lots on bad business jargon in this space, but other fields of endeavour have also been polluting the language.

Surface
This is from the world of technology, a jargon-generator if ever there was one.

As in This AI solution will surface all the relevant case law.

Please, techies, stop calling every product or service a solution for one thing; but also, stop using the verb surface in this way.

Things surface, but one does not generally surface things. Here, it means nothing more than plain old find.

Just say that.

Transparency
Blame NGOs and civil …

This was cited in Guthrie’s Guide as an example of bad business jargon, without much additional commentary.

Because of its ubiquity, this dreadful phrase merits a few words.

Ubiquity, for starters. The phrase appears in nearly 5,000 posts on Lexology, which to me suggests one word: hackneyed (and therefore to be avoided).

It’s also unnecessary, as there are perfectly good, plain alternatives: lessons or important points come to mind (but, please, not learnings).

And if you have readers in the UK, you may occasion some scratched heads: a takeaway is a take-out meal or the establishment from whence it …

This was based on a post on the CALL listserv; many thanks to Michèle LeBlanc of the Université de Moncton for the information.

The Centre de traduction et de terminologie juridiques (CTTJ) at the Université de Moncton has been working on a project to translate important unilingual Canadian court decisions into Canada’s other official language. The project currently focuses primarily on the areas of criminal law and family law.

The translated cases are available here: https://www6.umoncton.ca/cttj/jurisprudence-pancanadienne/ and can be searched by style of cause, file number or jurisdiction. The translations can also be found on CanLII.

— Susannah Tredwell…

Lawyers find it difficult to use one word when they could use two. Here are some further examples.

Forward progress
All progress is forward-looking; that’s why it’s progress.

Null and void
The two elements mean the same thing, so there is no need to use both.

As a drafting point, it’s a dangerous phrase. If doing (or not doing) something renders a contract null and void (or terminated), you may not be able to sue the breaching party because there is no longer any underlying obligation. You are better to say that the non-breaching party is relieved from performance …

In an op-ed piece prompted by the Ontario government’s threatened invocation of the Charter’s ‘notwithstanding’ clause (s 33), Professor Lissa Paul of Brock University mused about the prevalence of similar ‘useless adverbs’ in student writing: ‘”Notwithstanding” and the Transition Word Epidemic’, Globe & Mail, 21 September 2018.

Wise words. The ‘infestation’ of so-called ‘transition words’ in undergraduate essays is also a weakness found in legal writing, which is replete with adverbs ‘feigning the existence of non-existent connections’.

Odds are, if you’re using words like additionally, furthermore, moreover and nevertheless to connect sentences, paragraphs or sections …

Be careful: There may be another you out there, lurking in the non-SEO-optimized back quarters of the internet. Another website profile with your name, maybe even your firm’s name, but with different contact information.

Lawyer impersonation is a serious problem. Many lawyers have been shocked to discover alternate website or contact information from person(s) purporting to be the lawyer in question, offering legal services. At other times, a potential client will contact a firm to speak to a lawyer they believed they had already been corresponding with, only to find that they had actually been speaking with a fraudster impersonating …

A friend, who is originally from the UK and not a lawyer, asked me why we call our trainees articling students.

The articling element comes from the articles (provisions, clauses) of the agreement by which a mediaeval apprentice was bound to his (it would have been his in the Middle Ages) principal.

In full it was always articles of clerkship for would-be lawyers, clerk being an old word for anything kind of scribe-y. My late, very old-school father would refer to articled clerks (and pronounce the second word to rhyme with larks not lurks).

In British Columbia, the …

Last Thursday, CanLII unveiled its newest endeavour: the CanLII Manual to British Columbia Civil Litigation. The resource consists of nine “pathfinders” dealing with specific areas of the law, a guide to civil procedure at the BC Supreme Court, and annotated rules of court for both the BC Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals.

There is a lot of very useful information in this publication but there was one particular resource I wanted to highlight: the annotated rules of court. Lawyers frequently want to consult an annotated rules but up until now there has been nothing available freely online …

Lawyers are becoming pretty practiced at working remotely. But just because meetings, emails and deadlines are all on track, doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is under control. Despite everyone’s best efforts to normalize life with video conferencing and other remote management tools, there may still be some looming issues.

While our collective online connection is tremendously valuable, these virtual business exchanges can sometimes feel transactional and be ineffective in creating meaningful human connections.

So, today’s tip is to take the time to reach out to the people in your network that may benefit from a more personal interaction. A phone …

The error in the title is deliberate, for two reasons.

First, it’s important to proofread everything, including titles, recipient names in a memo, captions for diagrams or pictures (see below), footnotes. It’s particularly embarrassing if you spell your client’s name incorrectly or your managing partner’s.

Second, prof for proof is a play on words, prompted by the experience of students at the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto.

A certain law professor (who will not be named here – but who is identified in the original story) copied and pasted exam questions from a previous year. …