Inter Alia

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Hi, I'm Jonathan. Welcome to TransLegal's lesson of the week.

Today I'm going to teach you some Latin. Although it’s a dead language it can still be used to positive effect by lawyers. Do bear in mind though that, generally speaking, lawyers like to use plain language these days and there's been a definite trend towards this in the past few years, particularly in the commercial world. It's important that clients can understand you.

However, certain Latin phrases are still commonly used by lawyers especially in legal writing. One is the term inter alia which means among other things.

Now the way to use this is very simple. You just replace the English term, among other things, with the Latin term, inter alia. So for example, "He is suing the company for, inter alia, breach of contract". This means that he is suing the company not just for breach of contract but for other violations as well and one thing to note is that when you use this term, inter alia, it should always be within commas like this and generally in italicised form, that is, in italics.

This is straightforward but what if we're talking about people, not things. This is where you need to use the term inter alios. This means among other people. For example, you can say "He is suing, inter alios, the company for breach of contract". This means that he's suing not just the company but other persons as well.

There's a very common tendency among lawyers to use just the term, inter alia, rather than the additional term, inter alios when talking about other people. Although this is widely spread and is very common, I think what you should try and do is differentiate between the two and use inter alios where it should be used.

Thank you for listening to today's Latin lesson and I look forward to speaking to you again. Please provide any comments in the comments section below.