All Our Tips
Get Help From Clio During COVID-19
Clio has just announced a $1 million COVID-19 legal relief initiative in order “to help create business continuity and peace of mind for you, your law firm or your legal organization. Open to the entire legal industry, funding can be used towards financial assistance for legal technology, getting educational support from industry leaders, and onboarding support as you move to the cloud.”
Learn more and apply for help at https://www.clio.com/covid-relief/
Are You Old or Just Elderly?
Elderly is a tricky word.
In North America, it’s used as a euphemistic — or at least less harsh — way to say old. Example: The elderly are considered among those at the greatest risk of contracting the coronavirus.
What the threshold age is for that is more difficult to determine. Sixty years is the number generally seen in relation to COVID-19, but otherwise it might be set at 65 or higher. Sixty-five is the new 55?
A further complication is that usage of the word is different in the United Kingdom (and perhaps Australia, New Zealand and other dominions beyond the seas). There, it is used to mean ’not old, but getting up there’. The -ly suffix operates like -ish or -like, essentially.So, anywhere from about 50?
North Americans seem not to like referring to harsh realities like old age: a senior citizen here would be an old age pensioner (or OAP) in the UK.
And heaven forbid that anyone should mention death in Canada or the USA; people now pass away or even just pass, both dreadful, mealy-mouthed circumlocutions.
That happens in the UK too, of course. It used to be that people who had completed their studies at Oxford (gone down, in university parlance) were called old members, regardless of age. Now they are alumni, the American, academic, Latinate, age-neutral term. The cricket and rowing teams for Magdalen College alumni are still called the Withered Lilies, however — a reference to the flowers, in more flourishing condition, found in the college arms.
A colleague recently bristled when someone described her as elderly, but perhaps the person using the adjective was British, in which case it was accurate.
But I didn’t point that out.
Free Products and Resources for Legal Professionals During COVID-19 Crisis
A very quick tip today: Bob Ambrogi has assembled a webpage that lists “products and services offered by companies for free to support the work of legal professionals during the coronavirus crisis.”
LawSites: Coronavirus Resources
If you have something to add to the list, email Bob (ambrogi-at-gmail.com) or tweet him (@bobambrogi).
Hat tip to Jordan Furlong for the heads-up.
Finding Historical Federal Committee Information
LegisInfo provides committee information (e.g. the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology) back to the 35th Parliament, 1st Session (1994).
However if you need to research parliamentary committees prior to this date, you can use the Library of Parliament’s Canadian Parliamentary Historical Resources. These cover the 6th Parliament (1887-1888) to the 34th Parliament (1988-1993).
Unfortunately, while you can view the committee proceedings online, they cannot be downloaded as PDFs at this time.
Lawyers Ahoy-Hoy: Six Tips for Better Telephone Calls
Like fashion, communication methods evolve, change, and sometimes come back again. During the twentieth century, telephones became ubiquitous, largely replacing the need for written telegrams and letters. Today, that trend has reversed, with text messages and e-mail the dominant and preferred method of communication in many contexts, especially with younger generations.
But effective telephone communication is a skill that can atrophy as we use it less in our daily lives. As such, here are six things to consider before picking up that antiquated telephone contraption.
1. Prepare
Preparing for a call ensures that key points and issues will be discussed and will keep the conversation on track. Preparing might mean thinking about the call for a couple minutes, jotting down an outline, or thinking of specific language for sensitive topics.
2. Protect
Before taking a confidential call on your cell phone, find a private place to have the conversation or, if possible, wait until returning to the office.
3. Listen
Active listening cues, such as vocal acknowledgements or positive affirmations of understanding, can help keep conversations positive and effective.
4. Control
Excessive volume (see: yelling) is always a potential problem when contentious matters are at issue. If the other side lets their passions inform their volume, it’s okay to calmly inform them that they are yelling and ask them to stop (especially if it’s not a client).
5. Articulate
If your call is sent to voicemail, it’s a good idea to hang-up, compose the message you want to leave, and then call back. Clearly state the reason for the call, whether you will call back, give and spell your name, and provide a number at which you can be reached (and then repeat it for good measure).
6. Memorialize
Always make a written record of a phone conversation with clients or opposing counsel, either in a personal memo or follow-up email. Habitually doing so can prevent serious headaches and malpractice claims down the road.
Shawn Erker (@ShawnErker) is Legal Writer & Content Manager at LAWPRO.
More on (Non-)Latin Plurals
I groan (inwardly) every time I see or hear the word syllabi at the law school where I teach.
Syllabus has become fully acclimatised and should go the way of normal English plurals: syllabuses.
In the same category is forum. Your Latin teacher (if you had one), would have insisted on the plural fora, of course. Both fora and forums are correct in English (although auto-correct wants to turn fora into for a).
Forums is preferable, and there is judicial authority for this view: see the words of Belobaba J in Leon v Volkswagen AG, 2018 ONSC 4265 at para 40 n 33.
Of Bad Business Jargon There Is No End
Some further things to expunge from your professional (and non-professional) vocabulary.
Availability
This is, like functionality, a multisyllabic word that can usefully be replaced by something short and simple – and therefore clear and direct.
Not What’s your availability? A simple Are you free? (or busy or maybe even available) will do fine.
And not I have no availability – just I’m busy.
Piece
People will talk about the employment piece or the environmental piece of a transaction or what-have-you.
Conceptually it’s unobjectionable; it describes a part of a larger whole, an aspect of the bigger picture, an element of something more complex.
It’s just that it’s overused and therefore a bit weary. Couldn’t you try to vary things by referring to the employment issues (or aspects or components or …)?
Synergies
This is just jazzing up the ordinary with pseudo-scientific lingo. Why not just there are opportunities for co-operation (or collaboration), affinities, associations, links …?
Tweak
We don’t seem to revise or edit documents now; invariably we tweak them.
Originally, to tweak someone’s nose was to pull and twist that person’s proboscis. It came to be used figuratively, and at some point (in the 1960s?) it was applied to the making of fine adjustments to a car or other machine.
And from there to legal documents. Not sure how or why; and again, it’s OK in principle but worn-out from use. Find a new metaphor or go back to a plain, non-metaphoric description.
(More recently, to tweak (out) is to become twitchy from using amphetamines or meth. Not to be confused with twerk.)
Value proposition
If piece is overused, this one is done to death. What’s the value proposition?
Instead of this hackneyed phrase, try something simple like What value does it offer? What is it worth? What are you offering? Even What do you bring to the table? is better, though a bit trite.
Anything but the worn-out cliché of the value proposition.
From the Specific to the General
Burden
In a recent news release, the Ontario Securities Commission said this: ‘Most recently, the OSC announced 107 regulatory changes to reduce burden for market participants while maintaining critical investor protections.’
Good initiative, but the use of burden annoys me. The burden or the regulatory burden would be better: a specific thing, not a general state of affairs. A burden is a discrete load one bears, not the sum of all loads.
The load can be figurative, of course, whether it’s the weight of duty, blame, sin, responsibility, proof or securities regulation.
Stigma
Another word that gets used in the same way is stigma.
This is a borrowing from Greek, meaning the mark of a pointed instrument like a branding iron. The Greek plural stigmata is often used to describe the marks of the nails on the crucified body of Jesus.
In figurative use, a stigma is a mark or brand of disgrace, infamy and the like. We used to talk, for example, of the stigma of illegitimacy.
But stigma is now used as a word to describe the totality of shame-inducing responses to some state of affairs.
The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto uses stigma in grammatically correct ways, but also less well.
This is good: Challenging the stigma associated with mental illness takes understanding, education and a closer look at our own attitudes toward health.
Less so: Take a positive step toward addressing stigma with this online tutorial.
The sentiment is to be applauded; the usage could be better.
Chattel
The legal term chattel is often similarly (mis)used. A chattel is an item of movable personal property, with the plural chattels denoting a collection of such stuff.
Perhaps because of a perceived similarity with the collective cattle (and the two words in fact have a shared etymology), chattel sometimes gets used as a general/collective rather than a specific term: ‘Are we just going to be chattel for commerce?’ (New York Times, 24 January 2020, citing a 1997 Federal Trade Commission hearing).
—
Keep all three of these specific, with definite or indefinite articles attached.
Use Sessional Clippings Books for BC Legislative Research
British Columbia’s Hansard (the transcripts of the Legislative Assembly) was not published until 1970, making researching the intent behind a piece of pre-1970 legislation challenging.
Happily for researchers, the BC Legislative Assembly Sessional Clippings books from 1891 to 1972 are now available through the University of Victoria. These sessional clippings books “include newspaper accounts written by various legislative reporters who covered debates occurring in the British Columbia Legislative Assembly.”
The
As used (or not) in the names of countries.
One does still occasionally hear or see the Ukraine, but be careful not to use that around people of Ukrainian origin. They can get very shirty about it.
Their point is that the definite article the makes the country sound more like a region, like the Midwest or the Highlands – and, by implication, a sub-division of some larger entity.
And we all know which larger entity most Ukrainians are not longing to be part of again…
This is all fair enough, geopolitically speaking, but perhaps not linguistically.
First, Ukrainian (like other Slavic languages) uses no articles at all (no a, an or the), so perhaps can’t really dictate when English uses them.
Secondly, there are countries that do take an article as part of their names.
The definite article is part of the official names of The Gambia and The Bahamas.
The definite article is often – even usually – used with a range of other nations, as a matter of idiom. Many are archipelagos or include a form of government as part of the name, but not all: Central African Republic, Channel Islands, Comoros, Congo, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Lebanon (especially for those who know their Human League back catalogue), Maldives, Marshall Islands, Netherlands, Philippines, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Sudan, United Kingdom, United States of America, Yemen.
(The) Congo and The Gambia each takes its name from the river that runs through it.
But, if you’re likely to be read or heard by Ukrainians, the country is just Ukraine.
The Dominican is also likely to irritate Dominicans, for whom it is always the Dominican Republic (or sometimes even the historical Santo Domingo).
