How to use

LegalEasy

- the Legal English & Corpus Consultation

Website for Law students

The Home Page – Tutorial located here

The corpus of Legal Texts: mainly Case Reports, showing how legal terms are used most frequently in judicial discourse – e.g.. the most common patterns in use in Contract & Tort cases

First…. The Corpus…

This signals the “looping” mechanism, allowing 2 Options for refining your search

Then… Corpus Consultation

The 3-stop shop approach

If you know your search term, then start with Option 1

You need to decide if you’re interested in seeing the most frequent patterns that follow your term, or that precede your term

Choosing before or after searches:

Most search terms are nouns (concepts) or verbs (actions, processes): use common sense to work out which search direction will be more useful.

The “search before” function yields the most common expressions preceding “accept”…

• In descending order of frequency &

• In their legal context –showing the first e.g. of each type; to get the full set of examples, simply ….

The “search before” function yields the most common expressions preceding “accept”…

• In descending order of frequency &

• In their legal context –showing the first e.g. of each type; to get the full set of examples, simply click on the yellow triangle…..

Once you see each separate example, you can check the full text by clicking on the red search term

Once you see each separate example, you can check the full text by clicking on the red search term

However, the most valuable option open to you is to be able to refine your search. You can do this in 2 ways….

1. If you click on the blue-coloured term, you can refine your Option 1 search – a longer expression, allowing you to see what patterns emerge around that expression , so….– let’s try “I cannot accept….” and search for patterns that follow this phrase

The Blue terms highlight the kinds of terms that combine with “cannot accept”….

Note: every term is hotlinked – i.e. if you want to refine your search by looking at a different combination of terms, you simply click that (black) term, and the Concordancer goes to Option 2….

1: most common patterns

2: e.g.s of most common patterns

3: full text example, with case identified

Option 2 shows the most common ways 2 terms/phrases combine in your Law subject; we recommend “up to 3 words” as the optimal spread

Clearly by far the most common link between duty and care will be “of”, but the search then reveals the most common verbs linking them –their infinitive form and the typical qualifier “reasonable”

….. but the search then reveals the most common verbs linking them –their infinitive form

….. but the search then reveals the most common verbs linking them –their infinitive form and the typical qualifier “reasonable”

Again, notice that every term appearing in this set of results is hotlinked – i.e. if you want to refine your search by looking at a different combination of terms, you simply click that (black) term…

Colour coding functions:

Red: your search terms

Purple: what you are looking for

Green: contiguous terms – click to refine in Option 1

Black: all other terms: click to make split (Option 2) search

Finally – want to prove someone wrong? – check which of 2 forms is used most often (or not at all!)

GoogleFight is a fun way to settle a dispute – but it’s little use for checking legal English usage

QED: the 3-stop shop approach