The word hyphen comes from the Greek for together, which reflects the hyphen’s function as a connector. Dash is descriptive: it’s a bold stroke of punctuation, which can hive things off from each other as well as connect otherwise disparate elements.

The hyphen as connector
English, like German, likes to combine two or more words into one. The Germans just shove them all together, stringing a series of words into one long chain (Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz apparently being the longest; it means ‘beef-labelling supervision duties delegation law’, formerly in the statute book of the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, but now …

A question I have been asked numerous times is how to add personal notes, annotations, additional information or comments to an email that you have sent or received. There are numerous imperfect ways to add notes to email messages received or sent but no perfect method. For now, we can only pick one or two imperfect workarounds and hope that Microsoft will some day add this as a feature. There are third party plugins that facilitate adding notes to mail messages, but for this article I will limit the scope to Microsoft Office products.

Below are a few options you …

It’s tax time and the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.    Do you feel that you are paying to much taxes but only complain to your accountant when its tax time?  A better approach to to be proactive.

Check out tips to help you stay on top of next years taxes:

IDENTIFY HOW MUCH TAXES YOU ARE PAYING – AND BE PROACTIVE ABOUT REDUCING IT

1. Don’t wait until tax time. Contact your accountant early in the year
2. Have your tax bill forecasted in advance to identify potential tax reduction opportunities
3. Set aside

The trouble with using keywords when searching case law case law is that you can end up with a lot of false hits, particularly in situations where your search terms have multiple meanings or are commonly used. One solution is to limit your search to digests or headnotes. When you search digests or headnotes, it increases the probability that your search terms will return a relevant case. Limiting your search to a specific category of cases (e.g. bankruptcy and insolvency) is also a good way to reduce the number of false hits.

— Susannah Tredwell…

Lots of baby boomers are avoiding succession planning. One can only assume that at least some of them are lawyers!

So, for today’s tip, I’ll give you 5 good reasons to stop procrastinating:

1. Proactively planning for succession allows you to minimize the risk of having to deal with it in crisis mode, should you decide to retire earlier than expected.
2. It takes time to develop a thorough succession plan.
3. It may take longer than you expect to implement your succession plan. So, you will want to pad projections for training, mentoring and hiring, in case things don’t go as planned.

I wish people would think about the placement of the single word only. Where it falls in your sentence can have a crucial effect on meaning. Only feels lonely because it’s often in the wrong place at the wrong time, misused and misunderstood.

Consider these examples (devised by James Forrest, emeritus professor, Department of English, U. of Alberta):

He only told her that he loved her
He told only her that he loved her
He told her only that he loved her
He told her that only he loved her
He told her that he only loved her
He …

In the old working model, being less human—less attuned to interactions and emotional issues—was often a competitive advantage. Messy human stuff needlessly complicated matters. But the AI revolution will reward those who are more human in their approach to services involving high value consultation and collaboration.

How long will it be before robots learn people skills? Although there have been significant advances since the development of computer-based therapists several decades ago, humans have a solid head start that we need to exploit.

Gary Klein is a research psychologist known for his pioneering work in how people make high stakes decisions …

The Law Society of Saskatchewan Library team has created a series of helpful tutorial videos to aid legal researchers in searching CanLII and the Saskatchewan Cases Search.  You can watch the videos by clicking on the Library Tutorials button on the left side of the library homepage.

The short digestible videos demonstrate how to search each resource in key ways:

CanLII Tutorial Videos

1. A Basic “How-To” (5:57) [embedded above]
2. Searching for a Case with a Common Name (3:08)
3. Noting Up a Case with CanLII (2:22)
4. Searching for Case Law (2:04)
5. Searching for Legislation (2:44)

Saskatchewan Cases Search Tutorial …

Think about all the aspects of your job that you weren’t trained for.

Delegating

Managing people

Priority management

Developing job descriptions

Interviewing

Performance management

Leadership

Business planning

Retreats

Marketing

How much of your day is spent on this list and other such functions? How much of your energy does it take to learn and do it all?

Can you assess the impact on your success as a professional, and even on your very quality of life, if you were to improve in any of these areas, by say 20%? 30%? 40%? What about improvements to multiple areas?

You see where …

A few more words about would. (For previous advice, see Shall, will, should, would, may, might, must.)

Would is, of course, the conditional form of will. It’s used to express a potential (or non-existent) rather than a certain future state of being.

So it’s I will have the memo for you today but I would like to give you the memo today, but I’ve been asked to work on a big due diligence project instead.

Relatively straightforward, one would think – but one would be wrong.

Tense accord
No, not …