Counsel is an ancient term for one’s legal advisers as a body (The accused did not have the benefit of counsel when he was interrogated) or for a single legal adviser (Maria acted as counsel to the federal government, for which she was made Queen’s Counsel).

A judge will address a Canadian barrister as Counsel (if not by name); in the US, it would more usually be counselor (with a single American L).

The OED says counsel is ‘rarely’ pluralised; ‘should never be’, in my view (and Fowler’s), but I see it.

As a job title, …

One of the best headlines of 2018 was ‘Stormy Daniels’ Attorney Wants to Depose Donald Trump’. He’s not the only one …

Of course the CBC was using depose in its US legal sense, which is to examine a witness for the purposes of discovery or a later trial. Most Canadian non-lawyer readers would, however, have interpreted depose as overthrowing a bad king.

In Canada, we would not depose a witness or take a deposition – we would examine a witness for discovery.

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)…

While scrolling through my Twitter feed the other day, I learned a fantastic little trick for creating new files in Google Drive. Do you know this one?

You can start a new Google document, form, spreadsheet, site, or presentation simply by typing one of the following shortcuts into your browser’s address bar and hitting enter.

• Docs: doc.new, docs.new, document.new
• Forms: form.new, forms.new
• Sheets: sheet.new, sheets.new, spreadsheet.new
• Sites: site.new, sites.new, website.new
• Slides: slides.new, deck.new, presentation.new

Pretty slick, eh?

(h/t qz.com)…

Thanks to technology, we have habits no previous generation has ever had. You probably wake up in the morning and pick up your cell phone first thing. You check your emails before you brush your teeth. You sit down at your desk in the office and check your emails before you check your to-do list. You hear a chime and look at your phone and check your emails in the middle of a contract you’ve been drafting for the last hour. You think there’s got to be a better way. And there is. Now, I don’t yearn for the way …

Baked in
This is (regrettably) now used to mean something like integral.

Does it have its origin in that vacuous remark by the sometime MP Belinda Stronach about baking ‘a bigger economic pie’ (whatever that was intended to mean)? I don’t know, but please stop talking about things being baked in; you’re a lawyer, not a baker.

C Suite
This was once, I suppose, a fresh way to describe senior management at a company. It is now past its sell-by date.

Flip
Not as in flip your lid but rather flip me an e-mail.

I’ve never liked …

2019 is here and rather than lament about funds you already spent in 2018, now is the time to get back on track and set savings goals.  Statistics say the average millionaire saves at least 20 percent of what they earn.  Are you on track to create real wealth for yourself in 2019? If you are an incorporated professional pay close attention to this tip:  There are still ways to save for retirement using your corporation even with the recent tax changes.  Consider the benefits of creating your very own personal pension plan.

 WHAT IS AN INDIVIDUAL PENSION PLAN ?…

I forget where we are in the series. Part 8? Anyway…

Avert/advert
One averts one’s gaze from something unpleasant; one adverts (turns one’s attention) to other matters. The two have been confused since the Middle Ages.

Forgone/foregone
My friend Ross Guberman has noted Warren Buffet’s confusion of these two words: the Sage of Omaha wrote to this followers that ‘Investing is an activity in which consumption today is foregone in an attempt to allow greater consumption at a later date’.

A nicely expressed observation, but for the error; Buffet means forgone (‘relinquished’, ‘given up’) not foregone (‘preceding’, as in foregone …

There are many reasons to pity Melania Trump (although maybe she knew what she was signing up for and got what she deserved – hard to say, really).

Mrs T got into some linguistic hot water with the slogan for her campaign for children’s health and happiness, launched in May 2018: Be Best.

As Tim Hill has pointed out in The Guardian, this doesn’t hold up to what he calls ‘the laws of English grammar’ (I’d soften that a bit and call them rules; English is more flexible than laws would suggest).

One can be good and …

Lexbox was designed to make your legal research faster and easier. To help you use Lexbox to the best of its ability, we are sharing Lexbox tips with you from time to time.  Here’s one if you are using Lexbox on the CanLII website.

Today’s tip is about saving a specific paragraph from a decision on Lexbox, so that you can include it in your research record, and revisit it anytime.

1. If you are not already logged in, login or create

Summons is one of those odd nouns that ends in –s in its singular form; so the plural is summonses.

Odder still is the use of summons as a verb, meaning to command someone’s appearance in a court of law by way of a summons. Verbs don’t typically end in –s either.

Not everyone is happy with this state of affairs: Glanville Williams wrote in Learning the Law, 11th ed. (1982) that ‘the horrible expression “summonsed for an offence” (turning the noun “summons” into a verb) has now become accepted usage, but “summoned” remains not only …