Definition
"Tal" is an archaic term of English legal practice referring to the act of a plaintiff's attorney in accepting or receiving a verdict on behalf of his client in open court. The term appears in older procedural contexts describing the moment at which counsel formally takes — that is, receives and acknowledges — a verdict rendered by the jury, completing the record of the proceeding.
The word functions as a verb form or abbreviated notation in court records and pleading practice, signifying that the attorney of record stood present and accepted the jury's finding in the client's name.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A male given name or surname of Hebrew origin.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not listed as an English word in Webster's 1913; the term was already receding from common use by the nineteenth century.
The gap here is complete. In ordinary English, "tal" is recognized only as a personal name. Its legal meaning — an attorney's formal acceptance of a verdict in court — has no counterpart in common usage and would be entirely opaque to a modern reader encountering it in a historical case record.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers are most likely to encounter "tal" in manuscript court records, plea rolls, or printed reports from English common law practice predating the nineteenth century. In that context, the notation signals the procedural moment at which the verdict became formally received on behalf of the prevailing party, which can matter when reconstructing the timeline of a proceeding or establishing when judgment became final.
Because the term is extremely compressed — appearing sometimes as a marginal notation or abbreviation rather than a full word — it is easy to overlook or misread. Researchers working with early American colonial or state court records modeled on English practice may also encounter it, though it fades from American procedural records as formal pleading practices modernized.
Burrill's entry is spare, providing only a single sentence of context. Researchers should not expect fuller treatment in most historical legal dictionaries; the term was already specialized and receding when the major nineteenth-century legal dictionaries were compiled.
There is no meaningful jurisdictional variation to track because the term belongs to a now-obsolete procedural vocabulary rather than to any living body of law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary source for this term in the historical legal dictionary corpus. Burrill offers only the brief notation that "tal" describes the act of an attorney taking a verdict for his client in court — a single-sentence entry that confirms the term's procedural meaning but provides no elaboration on its origins, frequency of use, or the procedural rules governing when and how the act was performed.
Other major historical legal dictionaries — including Bouvier, Black's early editions, and Jacob's Law Dictionary — do not appear to carry the term, suggesting it was already marginal by the time those compilations were assembled. The absence from Bouvier is notable given Bouvier's broad coverage of common law terminology; it suggests "tal" may have been more characteristic of English court practice than of American practice even in the early republic.
Researchers should treat Burrill's entry as confirmatory rather than exhaustive. The term's full procedural context must be reconstructed from primary sources in English common law pleading and practice.