Lawyers, you know that if you want your firms to be more efficient and profitable, you need to delegate.

You know that if you want more time with your families and the occasional good night’s sleep, you need to delegate.

You even know that if you want to grow in your role (and to allow others to do the same), you need to delegate.

So, what’s the problem?

Why are lawyers holding back when it comes to delegating?

Lots of possibilities…  You’ve had some bad experiences where you ended up doing the work you had delegated yourself, at the 11th …

Go easy with these.

Capitals

Where there are too many words with capital letters, the visual effect is jarring and over-emphatic. Don’t succumb to what Bryan Garner calls ‘the unfortunate tendency toward contagious capitalization’ in legal writing.

Above all, Resist the Temptation to Capitalise Important Words, which can look a bit Winnie the Pooh (‘I have been Foolish and Deluded … and I am a Bear of No Brain at All.’).

By all means say ‘the Government of Canada issued bonds’, but when the reference is more general, you can lose the upper case: ‘the government wants to extend tax …

♫ Go, go, go New Justice Team
Go team, go team, team team team
Who’s that newest Justice Team…♫

Music by Christopher Tyng, Lyrics by Ron Weiner, recorded by The New Justice Team.

Changes are coming to SlawTips!  I would like to introduce our new enhanced team of practice tipsters.

Our team will now include:

• Michael McCubbin, Vancouver
• Andrea Cannavina, New York City
• Stacey Gerrard, Halifax
• Sandra Bekhor, Toronto
• Mark Morris, Toronto
• Elizabeth Mah, Vancouver
• Bjorn (Barney) Christianson, Portage la Prairie
• Ian Hu, Toronto

who will be joining Garry Wise and I in posting all the best tips that …

In 2011 Shaunna Mireau wrote about the usefulness of CanLII as a monitoring tool for the latest decisions in an area of law. I’m updating that tip by highlighting the value added by LexBox for this sort of CanLII monitoring.

As Shaunna wrote, the basic approach to using CanLII for decision monitoring is a quick three step process.

1. Compose a search that will retrieve the type of decisions you’re looking to monitor for.
2. Sort your results by “most recent” rather than “by relevance”.
3. Click the RSS button and copy and paste the provided URL into your feed reader of choice.

Most lawyers have a profile on LinkedIn and possible one or two other social media sites. Some have made a great success of it. But many aren’t really sure what they’re doing there. So, they pop in once in a while, join some groups, post some news and share some articles, all to try and garner a bit of attention for their firms. They may even have encouraged their staff to do the same.

All the while, that little voice inside their head is asking them why they bother at all. It just seems to be such a waste of …

This could be a long one, but I’ll restrain myself as much as possible. And I admit, not all of these are strictly writing tips.

Many aspects of the working day are, well, kind of boring. In response, people in business seem to want to jazz up the English language – but the result , more often than not, is a collection of expressions that were often bizarre to start with and hackneyed soon after.

If everyone is using them, you don’t want to. Instead, dazzle your reader (or listener) with language that is clear, precise and original.

In the …

♫ I know that something has changed
Never felt this way
I know it for real
This could be the start
Of something new…♫

Music and lyrics by: Matthew Gerrard, Robbie Nevil, recorded by Vanessa Hudgens.

(Photo: CC BY-SA 3.0)

The American Bar Journal on April 1, 2015 posted an article on “100 Innovations in Law” by Jason Krause.  It is an interesting review (admittedly from an American perspective) of how law has changed over the last 100 years or so. It makes for an intriguing read, but with all due respect to the author, I would …

When looking at legislation it is sometimes helpful to know if there are similar provisions in other provinces. Rather than reading through each and every statute to check for equivalent provisions, it is much faster to use a concordance.

The trick is finding a concordance for a specific act. While concordances don’t exist for all acts, they do exist for a significant number of them. Publishers often include concordances in consolidated legislation. For example, LexisNexis’s Consolidated Canada Business Corporations Act & Commentary concords the Canada Business Corporations Act with all the provincial and territorial business corporations acts.

Concordances also exist …

♫ This is the end, beautiful friend 
This is the end, my only friend, the end..♫

Lyrics and music by: Bruce Franklin, Eric Wagner, Rick J. Wartell, recorded by The Doors.

(© Copyright Peter Ward and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence)

Garry Wise, my co-author in our SlawTips.ca weekly column, had his mother pass away this past weekend.  Extending condolences and sharing his grief is only natural; but it started me thinking about whether there were anything we can take away from the grief and try to find meaning in the loss.

Another friend of …

Bryan Garner, editor of Black’s Law Dictionary and a legal writing expert, recently blogged on the exciting topic of when italics should be used for Latin words and phrases and when they can be in roman (plain) type. It must have been a slow day in the blogosphere.

His ‘fuzzy rule’ is that you can skip the italics when the word has become fully naturalised into English. So, ‘habeas corpus’ and ‘prima facie’, but ‘sensu stricto‘ and ‘in pari materia‘.

In a waspish mood, I left a comment on Garner’s blog, asking whether it wouldn’t be …