Legal writing often involves a need to talk about how something relates to something else. And there are lots of phrases to help us do this when we draft legal texts.
If the wrong prepositions are used when these phrases are deployed, readers are likely to understand even so. Nonetheless, writing sounds more authoritative if you use the right ones, and generally that’s a quality that clients are pleased to perceive in their lawyers.
Below are a few phrases in the form that I would tend to accept them:
- with reference to (or ‘in reference to’ though the OED suggests that this is a secondary option)
- with regard to (and it’s a cardinal sin to write ‘regards’, which is used in greetings to convey best wishes)
- with respect to (I like ‘in respect of’, but it’s a purely British option and people familiar with American English tend to think it sounds odd)
- in relation to (or ‘relating to’; this replaces ‘that/which relates to’ so in my view is preferable to ‘related to’, which replaces ‘that/which has been related to’, an unnecessary passive)
- in connection with
- in association with
A further point is that all of the above phrases are unnecessarily wordy if you aren’t using them to mean exactly what they say. If you can use simpler options such as ‘for’, ‘with’, ‘about’, or ‘concerning’, it’s usually a good idea to do so.
