Clio has just announced a $1 million COVID-19 legal relief initiative in order “to help create business continuity and peace of mind for you, your law firm or your legal organization. Open to the entire legal industry, funding can be used towards financial assistance for legal technology, getting educational support from industry leaders, and onboarding support as you move to the cloud.”

Learn more and apply for help at https://www.clio.com/covid-relief/ …

Elderly is a tricky word.

In North America, it’s used as a euphemistic — or at least less harsh — way to say old. Example: The elderly are considered among those at the greatest risk of contracting the coronavirus.

What the threshold age is for that is more difficult to determine. Sixty years is the number generally seen in relation to COVID-19, but otherwise it might be set at 65 or higher. Sixty-five is the new 55?

A further complication is that usage of the word is different in the United Kingdom (and perhaps Australia, New Zealand and other dominions …

A very quick tip today: Bob Ambrogi has assembled a webpage that lists “products and services offered by companies for free to support the work of legal professionals during the coronavirus crisis.”

LawSites: Coronavirus Resources

If you have something to add to the list, email Bob (ambrogi-at-gmail.com) or tweet him (@bobambrogi).

Hat tip to Jordan Furlong for the heads-up.…

LegisInfo provides committee information (e.g. the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology) back to the 35th Parliament, 1st Session (1994). 

However if you need to research parliamentary committees prior to this date, you can use the Library of Parliament’s Canadian Parliamentary Historical Resources. These cover the 6th Parliament (1887-1888) to the 34th Parliament (1988-1993).

Unfortunately, while you can view the committee proceedings online, they cannot be downloaded as PDFs at this time. 

— Susannah Tredwell…

Like fashion, communication methods evolve, change, and sometimes come back again. During the twentieth century, telephones became ubiquitous, largely replacing the need for written telegrams and letters. Today, that trend has reversed, with text messages and e-mail the dominant and preferred method of communication in many contexts, especially with younger generations.

But effective telephone communication is a skill that can atrophy as we use it less in our daily lives. As such, here are six things to consider before picking up that antiquated telephone contraption.

1. Prepare
Preparing for a call ensures that key points and issues will be discussed …

I groan (inwardly) every time I see or hear the word syllabi at the law school where I teach.

Syllabus has become fully acclimatised and should go the way of normal English plurals: syllabuses.

In the same category is forum. Your Latin teacher (if you had one), would have insisted on the plural fora, of course. Both fora and forums are correct in English (although auto-correct wants to turn fora into for a).

Forums is preferable, and there is judicial authority for this view: see the words of Belobaba J in Leon v Volkswagen AG, …

Some further things to expunge from your professional (and non-professional) vocabulary.

Availability

This is, like functionality, a multisyllabic word that can usefully be replaced by something short and simple – and therefore clear and direct.

Not What’s your availability? A simple Are you free? (or busy or maybe even available) will do fine.

And not I have no availability – just I’m busy.

Piece

People will talk about the employment piece or the environmental piece of a transaction or what-have-you.

Conceptually it’s unobjectionable; it describes a part of a larger whole, an aspect of the bigger picture, …

Burden

In a recent news release, the Ontario Securities Commission said this: ‘Most recently, the OSC announced 107 regulatory changes to reduce burden for market participants while maintaining critical investor protections.’

Good initiative, but the use of burden annoys me. The burden or the regulatory burden would be better: a specific thing, not a general state of affairs. A burden is a discrete load one bears, not the sum of all loads.

The load can be figurative, of course, whether it’s the weight of duty, blame, sin, responsibility, proof or securities regulation.

Stigma

Another word that gets used in the …

British Columbia’s Hansard (the transcripts of the Legislative Assembly) was not published until 1970, making researching the intent behind a piece of pre-1970 legislation challenging.

Happily for researchers, the BC Legislative Assembly Sessional Clippings books from 1891 to 1972 are now available through the University of Victoria. These sessional clippings books “include newspaper accounts written by various legislative reporters who covered debates occurring in the British Columbia Legislative Assembly.”

— Susannah Tredwell…

As used (or not) in the names of countries.

One does still occasionally hear or see the Ukraine, but be careful not to use that around people of Ukrainian origin. They can get very shirty about it.

Their point is that the definite article the makes the country sound more like a region, like the Midwest or the Highlands – and, by implication, a sub-division of some larger entity.

And we all know which larger entity most Ukrainians are not longing to be part of again…

This is all fair enough, geopolitically speaking, but perhaps not linguistically.

First, Ukrainian …