Definition
As a legal term of art, "conveniently" describes the standard of conduct expected of a public officer or other duty-bound party when the law requires an act to be performed without specifying a precise time or method. It does not mean "whenever it is easy" or "at one's preference." Rather, it means: whatever can be accomplished through the exercise of reasonable diligence. When a statute or order directs that something be done "conveniently," the obligation is real and enforceable — the word qualifies how and when, not whether.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "In a convenient manner, form, or situation; without difficulty" — and, notably, "in a manner provoking suspicion due to how well it suits someone's purposes."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "In a convenient manner, form, or situation; without difficulty."
Editorial note: The common meaning of "conveniently" carries a strong implication of personal ease, optionality, or — in contemporary usage — self-serving timing. The legal meaning inverts this. Legally, "conveniently" imposes an objective duty grounded in reasonable diligence, not a permission to act when personally convenient. A researcher reading the word in a historical statute or writ and importing its colloquial meaning will misread the legal standard entirely.
Common Confusion
"Conveniently" is occasionally read as interchangeable with "promptly" or "soon." Anderson's cross-reference to SOON is instructive: the terms are functionally related in that both impose a reasonable-diligence standard rather than a strict deadline, but they are not identical. "Soon" typically carries a stronger temporal urgency. "Conveniently" emphasizes feasibility under reasonable effort — the officer must act when the act can be accomplished without undue difficulty, not merely as soon as time allows. Both words resist precise definition and have historically been resolved by courts asking what a diligent officer could and should have done under the circumstances.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary trap for researchers is treating "conveniently" as surplusage or as a softening qualifier with no legal bite. In historical statutes governing sheriffs, process servers, and other ministerial officers, "conveniently" was a term of duty, not discretion. An officer who failed to act when he could conveniently have done so was in breach.
The word appears most often in older statutory and procedural language — writs, service-of-process rules, and administrative directives — and tends to drop out of modern drafting in favor of explicit time deadlines or "reasonably practicable" formulations. Researchers working with pre-20th-century materials should be alert to it.
In contract law, particularly construction and government contracting, the word migrates into a different but related context: "termination for convenience" clauses, where the concept of convenience is again a term of art carrying specific legal meaning rather than an ordinary-language sense of ease or preference. These are formally distinct uses, but the underlying research instinct is the same — the legal meaning of "convenience" and its adverbial form is always more demanding and more specific than the common meaning.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law is the sole historical dictionary source for this entry, and its treatment is brief but precise. Anderson cross-references SOON and defines the term functionally: whatever a duty-bound officer can accomplish through reasonable diligence, he can "conveniently" do. This framing locates the word within the broader common-law vocabulary of ministerial obligation — a cluster of terms (soon, forthwith, reasonable time, conveniently) that imposed graduated but real standards of conduct on officers executing legal process.
Anderson's entry does not address the word's appearance in contract language or in equity practice, where "as may be conveniently done" also appeared in orders and decrees. Researchers should not assume Anderson's ministerial-officer context exhausts the term's legal range.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Termination for Cause vs. Termination for Convenience — Law Mind Real Estate Transactions & Construction Encyclopedia (realestate_99). Addresses the contract-law context in which "convenience" operates as a formal legal standard governing a party's right to terminate, distinct from the procedural-duty context covered here.