Making it happen is not always easy.

Chris Riley of Lexology has some helpful suggestions for increasing lawyer engagement in what he calls ‘content marketing’:

• write about topics your clients tell you they’ve been worrying about
  • describe the issue and propose a solution
• don’t simply parrot news items
  • add your own perspective to the story or legal issue
• keep it short!
  • Lexology’s readers overwhelmingly prefer to read something between 600 and 1,000 words in length
• use analytical data available through Lexology (and your own firm’s marketing department)
  • identify articles and topics that have worked in the past
• consult Lexology’s ‘popular

“Private acts” are acts that are passed to deal specifically with the private interests of a person, company, or organization; for example the Acme Assurance Company Incorporation Act, S.C. 1931, c. 71 is a private act. Private acts can be found both federally and provincially. 

One challenge with researching private acts is that they may not be consolidated in their jurisdiction’s Revised Statutes. If this is the case, a researcher will have to pull the original act (which may be quite old) and any subsequent amendments, and produce a consolidation manually. On the plus side, private acts tend not …

Does it still strike you as odd to see Cate Blanchett or Meryl Streep described as an actor?

Actress is in fact a relatively new word in English, because no females performed on stage in England before the seventeenth century (although the OED does say that actor was applied to both sexes in the early days of the mixed stage).

Even now, not everybody is using actor for both women and men. There are more than 75,000 women who describe themselves on LinkedIn as an actress. Oscars are not yet awarded to the best female actor – much …

On a recent Canada Day, someone on LinkedIn referred to O’Canada, which is clearly wrong. (O’ is confined to Irish surnames, where it is the anglicised version of the Gaelic Ó or Ua, meaning ‘descendant of’; M(a)c [or M’], as for the Scots, means ‘son of’).

But is it O Canada, Oh! Canada or what?

O, not followed by punctuation and closely linked in sense to what follows, is what’s called a vocative – and is correct in things like national anthems or hymns.

Oh is usually followed by punctuation and is more like …

Administrator’s note: thanks to Erin Cowling for this week’s tip.

We all know that taking a real vacation makes us less stressed, more focused, and in return, better lawyers, better employees, and better bosses. Even though I love my job, I still need a break from it. I need to unplug and unwind. I need to think about something other than the law. When I do, I return to my practice with more energy and commitment.

When I worked for someone else, I always took all my allotted vacation. I felt I was working hard and I rightly deserved the …

Absent
Odds are, the only way you used this word before you went to law school was to describe physical absence: I was absent from school that day because I had the flu.

Then, all of a sudden, in 1L you started saying things like absent evidence to the contrary because it made you sound all, like, lawyer-y.

Please revert to your pre-law ways. Without or even in the absence of will strike your non-lawyer readers as normal.

And that’s a good thing.

In a position …
You aren’t in a position to do X, Y, or Z?

Just say …

Today’s practice tip is to get more mileage from your writing with CanLII Connects.

If you write commentary on caselaw for a personal or firm blog, client publications, or any other publication, you can upload it to CanLII Connects, where it can be discovered by anyone who searches for that particular case, both on CanLII Connects AND on CanLII.org.

CanLII cases that have corresponding CanLII Connects commentary will display this info just under the case name:

Not only is CanLII Connects commentary discoverable via individual cases, the full-text is integrated in search results within CanLII, too. Per the …

Based on a discussion on the CALL listserv – many thanks to Martha Murphy for all the information.

One of the services typically offered by law libraries is legislative tracking. Examples of this service include tracking a bill from First Reading to Royal Assent (and beyond) and alerting users to proposed changes to an existing piece of legislation. 

Depending on how much legislation they need to track, librarians can either check the source (e.g. LEGISinfo or legislative website) on a regular basis or they can set up an alert for any legislative changes. The federal government and some provinces (such …

September always seems to be a time when Canadians get more serious about work. Well, we have a short summer and we need to make the most of it, right?

One simple tip that can take some of sting out of leaving vacations behind and getting back to the daily grind is to get into the habit of setting small practice development goals. Large or small, every goal adds value. Starting small allows you the opportunity to see results quickly, sparking the motivation to continue. Starting small also helps to manage procrastination, by reducing larger projects into bite size chunks. …

We’ve covered a(n) historical already: an before an H word is, essentially, a historical holdover we can do without; but do it if it makes you feel better.

We have, however, safely abandoned the an that used to go before words like eulogy, one, unique and unit.

A reader has asked a related question about abbreviations. Is it an LLB or a LLB? A LCBO outlet or an LCBO outlet?

I think the classical rule was to use whichever form of the indefinite article would be appropriate if the abbreviation were spelled out …