I love planning trips almost as much as going on the trip itself. So, I am always on the lookout for cool travel apps.

Ulmon CityMaps2Go is now my key tool for planning (and executing) city trips. You can use different coloured markers to map out all of the tourist attractions, restaurants and shops that you want to visit. I find the visual grouping of sites makes it easy to plan a day. Or, in the midst of a trip, to determine where to go next.

Ulmon also enables you to share your great ideas with travel companions. Once I …

Technology has made life better in oh so many ways. Today, we can even make new connections with colleagues and clients, without leaving the comfort of our home or office.

But there’s been a price to pay.

We’ve become less inclined to get out there, in person. The truth is, it’s just so much easier not to. No traffic. No subway closures or delays. For lawyers, that translates into joining webinars instead of attending live conferences and other educational programs.

That’s a shame because there are so many good reasons to make the effort to show up in person. …

This doesn’t exactly count as legal research, but I periodically get asked for to confirm that a given person was the source of a quote. Most of the time, it’s fairly easy to track down, but in other cases, I end up using https://quoteinvestigator.com. It’s a wonderful resource for those situations where the quote you’ve been given might have been said by a number of different people and not in those precise words. Note that you will need to scroll down a little bit before you find the search box on the left hand side.

— Susannah Tredwell

…

As an enlightened country with an enlightened legal system practised by (hopefully) enlightened legal professionals, we are accustomed to certain neutralities that make no preference for religious beliefs. One such neutrality is the legal equivalence between swearing and affirming an affidavit. Accordingly, the form affidavits provided by courts in every Canadian common law jurisdiction contain a jurat with the words “Sworn (or Affirmed) before me at . . .”, with the options of “swearing” or “affirming” both accounted for in the template language.

However, while an affiant may be free to choose between swearing and affirming, it may be good …

Deck
Can you flip me the deck?

No, but I’ll happily send you the slides.

Page-flip
When people talk about doing a page-flip through a document, it always make me think it will be a superficial job.

Let’s be less casual, more thorough and less jargon-y: read, review or go through that document.

Skill up
Using skill as a verb is unobjectionable in constructions involving its past participle, skilled: Nancy is a skilled practitioner of municipal law.

But that’s really the only verb form you should be using. Don’t skill up; instead, be trained, get …

In law and business, this now means an employee who snitches on bad practices by co-workers (especially the higher-ups) but who is protected from recrimination by legislative provisions like s 27 of the federal Digital Privacy Act and s 66.1 of the Competition Act, or, in the US, s 922 of Dodd-Frank.

Think Edward Snowden, but without the subsequent need to live as a fugitive.

All well and good (unless you’re Edward Snowden), but I’m weary of the word.

And it’s imprecise: in a sporting match, the whistle is blown not by a player, but by the referee …

Countless
If this word appears in your bio, please remove it immediately. (Search the website of a major Canadian law firm for the word and you’ll probably come across a silly example.)

It’s unlikely that Bob has authored countless case comments and articles. We could count them (if we wanted to).

And, while we’re at it, let’s change authored to written and admit that articling students did most of the work.

 Grab
This is frequently used in more casual e-mail correspondence (and in speech): Let’s grab lunch/drinks/coffee.

Isn’t it impolite to be grabby? Have or meet for would be …

This is my second post in a series on my favourite smart phone apps.

Here’s one for folks who are seriously pressed for time (aren’t we all?) but who are still trying to keep up with non-fiction reading. Blinkist provides access to 15-minute summaries of books on a range of topics, including leadership, politics, marketing, parenting, nutrition, technology, psychology and so forth.

The summaries are prepared by Blinkist’s team of experts – they refer to themselves as “life librarians” – who read about 1000 books per year and distil each book into its key insights.

I tested it out on …

As noted on Slaw – this week, Slaw Tips reached a big milestone: 1000 tips!

From the Slaw post:

Launched in 2011, the site’s very first tips dealt with turning off pop-up email notifications, finding moved web pages and preventing your firm’s star performers from being poached–all still relevant today.

Our current and past contributors are a talented team of practicing lawyers, librarians, consultants and entrepreneurs–smart folks who generously share their wisdom with our 15,000 monthly visitors.

We tip our hats (pun fully intended!) to all our past and present Tips authors: thank you for sharing your …

Slanted type like this, with a number of distinct uses.

Used in these posts to set off a word or phrase that is being discussed. Quotation marks would serve that purpose just as well, although things might look a bit cluttered and fussy.

More commonly, italics are used for emphasis. Go easy with emphasis of any kind: if everything is emphasised, the force is diminished.

In the old days of manual typewriters with only roman (non-italic) typeface, underlining stood in for italics. Underlining can still be used, especially where you’re quoting something that already contains italics but want to …