As mentioned earlier this year, CanLII has been adding secondary materials to its database. If you’re looking for recent articles from Canadian law journals, CanLII now offers access to sixteen journals:

• Alberta Law Review
• Appeal: Review of Current Law and Law Reform
• Canadian Bar Review
• Canadian Journal of Comparative and Contemporary Law
• Canadian Journal of Human Rights
• Canadian Law Library Review
• Canadian Parliamentary Review
• Dalhousie Journal of Legal Studies
• LawNow Magazine
• Manitoba Law Journal
• McGill Journal of Dispute Resolution
• McGill Journal of Law and Health
• McGill Journal of Sustainable Development Law
• Ottawa Law Review
• University of New Brunswick

So I belong to this listserv of mostly attorneys and everyone is talking about how they use Google for this and Google for that and all I can think is … is it just me?!  Why would anyone wish Google to be scanning and indexing their business records and documents – let alone a bunch of attorneys?

*start of rant*

Of course, you KNOW – any time your data touches a Google server it is being scanned and indexed. Right?

Seriously – you are giving every keystroke/word <-as best as speech recognition can figure out the words I …

There is a distinct love-hate relationship between the English and French languages. We’ve borrowed a lot from the French over the years, with mixed results.

All of this goes back a long way (1066, and all that), but shows no sign of abating.

French words we’ve more or less naturalised

There are some borrowings from French that we don’t even think about, because they’ve become fully anglicised, sometimes with changes in spelling: apartment, baton, hotel, parliament.

Sometimes we try to make anglicised French words more French again, for example when we pronounce niche like NEESH, instead …

You’ve had an up and down year, and suddenly when it rains, it pours. Clients are coming in by the bucket, tasks are piling up, and you have got to delegate your work. Your articling student ambles up to your office with a gentle knock, asking, “Hi – just wondering if you have any tasks I can help out with?” You make a mental note that this is a keen student, maybe a keeper. You hand her over a file, spend a few seconds explaining the task, and off she goes. That should do it, right?

But the articling student …

In honour of the Charter’s 35^th anniversary, the Department of Justice released the online Charterpedia. As noted on the site:

This Charterpedia provides legal information about the Charter and contains information about the purpose of each section of the Charter, the analysis or test developed through case law in respect of the section, and any particular considerations related to it. Each Charterpedia entry cites relevant case law, and citations to Supreme Court of Canada decisions are hyperlinked whenever possible.

It contains a wealth of information about the Charter by section, including info on similar provisions, purpose, and detailed …

An assistant called me recently, asking whether the other side on a transaction was correct to keep inserting an extra L every time the word instalment appeared in an agreement.

The traditional/British spelling is with only one L; the Yanks now generally use two – so I told the assistant to stick to her guns if she felt strongly about it.

Similarly, the classic spellings are fulfil and fulfilment – but one increasingly sees a doubling of the second L in both. Fulfill is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary Online only in the usage examples up to about 1600, …

When I start to write a document, the ideas in it never get to the page in publishable order. (I know I’m not alone in this.) Pieces of the “story” float about.

Many writers feel a compulsion to write from the start of a new document. That compulsion could make writing feel like cycling while gently holding the brakes. In more severe cases, it seems to lead to what some people call “writer’s block” and painful delays in drafting a document.

What writers need is a method they can use to create a first draft. Of course, lots of magic …

What’s the most productive day of the week?  Most HR directors report that Tuesday has that honour.  And the least productive? You guessed right! Friday.

Monday is a contender for most productive day of the week but what tends to get in the way of the doing are the meetings and planning that tends to get jammed into the Monday slot.

To help you get more out of your Fridays and to turn Monday into a productivity zone – try a Friday afternoon planning session.

A Friday afternoon planning session accomplishes three great things:

1. It sets you up for starting

While some of the paid tax resources provide reference tables that show what stage a proposed amendment to the Income Tax Act has reached, how do you figure this out if you don’t have access to one of these resources?

Step 1: What draft legislation are you interested in? Generally tax legislation is published as a “Notice of Ways and Means Motion” before it is introduced as a bill. The Department of Finance Canada provides a listing of all the Notice of Ways and Means Motions back to 2013 at https://www.fin.gc.ca/legislation/draft-avant-eng.asp. You can also find them on Taxnet Pro …

Linguistic redundancy, not the employment variety. In the linguistic category, there are both legal and non-legal redundancies.

The legal

We’ve seen these before (see ‘Gruesome twosomes‘), but they bear repeating.

Legalese is replete with pairs of words that mean the same thing and therefore don’t need to be used together (except to create a leaden, lawyerly effect).

Examples:

• cease and desist [how about plain old stop?]
• free and clear [one or t’other, not both]
• full and complete [same comment]
• if and when [ditto]
• null and void [just say of no effect]
• of no force or effect