What does it mean when you table a motion at a meeting?

It depends on where you live.

For those in the non-US parts of the English-speaking world, to table means to submit something formally for discussion or consideration.

The expression comes from act of laying your submission on the table of a legislative assembly or other decision-making body (like a board of directors). This usage goes back at least as far as the 1650s.

The Glossary of Parliamentary Procedure use table as a noun and verb in these senses: https://www.ourcommons.ca/About/Glossary/Index-e.html#LetterT

In the USA, however, tabling has, since the mid …

It’s disheartening to see how frequently people mess up with commas.

This kind of thing is all too common: Partner, Alfredo Garcia will be speaking about …

Remove that comma! And don’t be tempted to leave it but add one after Garcia! Both suggest that there is only one partner (which, as you know, is not possible as a matter of law).

Another version of the same error: My colleagues, Suresh and Amy, will … It’s not an error if these are your only colleagues, which is the implication of those offsetting commas. If you have more than just …

For legal professionals working with a high volume of cases, it can be difficult to stay up to date with legal research for all of them. However, with the alert feature on Lexbox, it’s easy to keep track of changes to legal information on CanLII that is relevant to your field of work or study.

Lexbox offers three types of alerts:

1. Citation alerts — these allow you to track the impact of a case over time.

2. Amendment alerts — these allow you to monitor the changes in a statute over time.

3. Query alerts — these …

One resource that users may not be aware is available in Westlaw Canada’s LawSource module is Black’s Law Dictionary, possibly because it is the only “international” piece of content included in the module.

Black’s Law Dictionary is the most widely used law dictionary in the United States and (according to Thomson Reuters’ marketing department) “the most widely cited law book in the world”.

To access this resource, log in to Westlaw Canada, go to the International tab and then click on the link to Black’s Law Dictionary.

— Susannah Tredwell…

This comes to all of us, whether we want it or not.

Increasingly nowadays, one can make a conscious end-of-life decision: note the hyphens you’ll need in order to make the phrase an adjective.

But what one should never do is make the phrase the horrible verb that I saw in an announcement from a tech provider that is discontinuing a line of software tools:

[Nameless tech vendor] is to end of life [products X, Y and Z] in a move that will see those core legacy products not supported after December 2023.

First, if they are ‘core products’, …

I fear they do not, as these recent examples of lawyerly prose will suggest:

·         bare with me

·         you have free rain

·         he is a real jem

The clear inference to be drawn from these solecisms is that people hear things but have not seen them in print (or even on a screen).

In a word-based profession, this is distressing (to say the least).

–Neil Guthrie (@guthrieneil)…

It pains me when I see the University of Oxford making terrible errors. But errors are errors.

Both occurred in recent LinkedIn posts.

The first:

One in four people in the world do not have access to safe drinking water.

That should, of course, be does because the subject of the sentence is One, not four or people. This is a distressingly common error, but not one Oxford should be making.

The second:

Between 2000-2015, 3248 people were infected with plague worldwide.

Rewrite that as either Between 2000 and 2015 … or From 2000 to 2015 …

Two …

Some frightful things that have imposed themselves on your humble scribe’s tender eyes.

Actual drafting by a senior partner

What this means is clear enough, but the drafting is simply awful:

Both whether or not the Code applies to the Proposed Structure and how it may apply to it therefore are central to appreciating if the Proposed Structure is a viable paradigm in law.

There are so many ways to improve that by putting it in normal English. How about this:

The Building Code may determine whether the proposed structure is legal.

Jump

Almost as bad, but not quite as …

No, not enclosures where odd things happen. Rather, combinations of words that look strange.

The New York Times – generally a newspaper one admires – has taken to writing things like monthslong: see, for example, Mary Hui, ‘After a Dip, Hong Kong Real Estate Again Eyes the Stratosphere’ (22 March 2019).

Compounds often start off as two or more words, become hyphenated and later lose the hyphen (holder of shares, share-holder, shareholder).

This doesn’t always work, however: securityholder looks weird. So does loophole, because it suggests the pronunciation loo-fole. The hyphen keeps …

Applying filters to your search results is a great way of narrowing them down and can help save time you might otherwise spend scrolling through hundreds or even thousands of results!

The search filters bar is accessible at the top of every search results page and features four primary filter tabs (All CanLII, Cases, Legislation and Commentary), each with their own set of subfilter categories.

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The number beside each filter indicates how many documents on CanLII are in each category. This number changes after you use the search fields and when you apply search …