You’ve drafted a client piece – now what?

Heed the words of Samuel Johnson:  ‘What is written without effort is generally read without pleasure.’

In other words, go back and edit; your text could always use some polishing.

Here are some specific tips.

• sleep on it – you will spot things the next morning that were not apparent the night before, especially if the midnight oil was burning (typos, spelling and grammar errors, stylistic things)
• get a second opinion – this will help with correctness, readability, errors you just aren’t seeing because you’re too familiar with your text (even after

♫ I can see a new horizon underneath the blazin’ sky
I’ll be where the eagle’s flying higher and higher
Gonna be your man in motion, all I need is a pair of wheels
Take me where my future’s lyin’, St. Elmo’s Fire…♫

Lyrics and Music by by David Foster and John Parr, recorded by John Parr.

……

The time has come for us, David Bilinsky and Garry Wise,  to pass the baton to a new generation of leaders and writers to carry on the work of SlawTips.

This, therefore, will be our final, and farewell post.

Garry …

Although most acts have a definitions section, usually at the beginning of the act, it is logistically impossible for an act to define all the words and terms it uses. If you are trying to find the meaning of a term that isn’t defined in an act, check that jurisdiction’s Interpretation Act. Definitions of terms that are used by multiple acts are quite often found in this act. For example, terms defined in the federal Interpretation Act include “herein”, “holiday” and “oath”. You will find Interpretation Acts in federal and all provincial legislation.

Interpretation acts are also useful when …

 Since you asked…

Baffled on Bay Street wonders: What’s with ‘Esquire’? Does it have some special meaning in law?

In mediaeval England, an esquire was one rank above a gentleman and one below a knight; hence the variant ‘squire’ for a trainee knight.

While the precise class of chaps eligible to be an esquire is a matter of intense historical controversy, it seems that you had to be the younger son of a nobleman, the son or grandson of a knight, or an office-holder (possibly including a barrister-at-law). By the 18th century, ‘Esquire’ came to be used as a polite …

I’ve noticed lawyers pop into LinkedIn or Twitter once in a blue moon and then completely disappear.

If that’s you and you’d like to figure out how to enjoy some of the benefit others have found on social media, here are a few tips to get you started:

1. You need a strategy. Define your target audience, point of different and purpose for your engagement, so you’re not scratching your head wondering what to do everytime you log in at LinkedIn.
2. Don’t waste your time on sites that aren’t aligned with your goals. The fastest way to get turned off social

A short tip today to remind you that you can deep link to a specific paragraph for most judgments on CanLII. This is helpful when you want to bring a colleague’s attention to specific paragraphs in a judgment.

Each decision on CanLII has a permanent URL, which will look like this:

http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2016/2016scc18/2016scc18.html

To create a link directly to paragraph 21 of this decision, just add #par21 after this permanent URL. The link to paragraph 21 of the decision would look like this:

http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2016/2016scc18/2016scc18.html#par21

I often use this when I’m sending a list of relevant case law to a colleague and …

♫ Their habits, I confess
None can guess with the couple…♫

Lyrics and music by Sammy Cahn and Neal Hefti.

Look at your desk and office. Whose office does yours resemble?  Oscar Madison’s or Felix Unger’s? Is your desk neat and tidy or more a hodgepodge of piles of paper, old coffee cups and files stacked everywhere with food wrappers interspersed? Of course The Odd Couple accented the extreme personal differences between Oscar, who is perhaps the world’s most famous slob and Felix, the extreme clean freak, as a way to create an underlying comedic friction as the backdrop …

By this, I don’t mean where partners spend their week-ends. Instead, I have horrors like these in mind:

herein

therein

wherein

hereinafter

thereinafter

heretofore

herewith

therewith

aforementioned [or (shudder) its bastard progeny, ‘above-referenced’]

thereof

thereto

whereas

whereof

whereupon

hitherto

inasmuch as

notwithstanding

As Richard Wydick puts it, these words ‘give writing a legal smell, but they carry little or no legal substance. When they are used in writing addressed to non-lawyers, they baffle and annoy. When used in other legal writing, they give a false sense of precision and sometimes obscure a dangerous gap in analysis’ (Plain …

Death, taxes and change.

Reputedly, these are among life’s inevitabilities. And while there is probably very little we can do about death and taxes, change is something we truly can manage.

A central theme of many of my Practice Tips posts has been the importance of planning for law firms and other professional practices. By occasionally stepping back from the demands of our day-to-day dealings and deadlines, we can gain the benefit of a longer view, think about objectives, and develop strategies and routines to meet our short and longer term goals.

There will be many changes along the way, …

Certain questions come up time and time again. You can save time by keeping a list of the most frequently asked questions and their answers; each time one of the questions on the list gets asked you can just cut and paste the answer.

FAQs can also work as a knowledge management tool. Although you may answer certain questions frequently, other staff members may not. One solution is to have these questions and answers saved centrally so they are accessible to all library staff.

To get even more bang for your buck, put these questions and answers on your intranet …