Category Archives: CanLII

Canadian Legal Apps

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Posted in Android, Apps, Canada, Canada Law Book, CanLII, Case Law, HeinOnline, iPad, Irwin Law, Law Journals, LexisNexis, Mobile, Social Science Research Network, U.S., Westlaw and tagged , , , , , , , ,

Canada-specific legal apps are still quite thin on the ground, although the publishers are now more active in releasing updates.  This is still primarily for iPad users.  Here’s a rundown:

  • Case Law.  First to market was LexisNexis Quicklaw (iOS) and that’s pretty much all there is.  No Westlaw Canada app, nor one from CanLII.  Garry Wise has created an iOS app called WiseLII that will search CanLII.  The Law Society of Upper Canada and LexisNexis have an Ontario Reports app which gives access to back issues as well as a handful of cases each week (iOS or Android).
  • E-books.  Thomson Reuters Carswell is delivering e-books through its Thomson Reuters Proview tool (iOS or Android).  LexisNexis sells its books for any e-book reader (iOS, Blackberry, Android).  Kindle isn’t listed but you might try using Calibre to convert the LexisNexis epub format to a mobi file, which is Kindle friendly.  Irwin Law has an online e-book library (Web-based) but you can also download a free app (iOS) for any books you own.
  • Law Journals.  If you aren’t getting your law journals as PDFs (like the free content on SSRN’s Legal Scholarship Network), you can try the HeinOnline app for everything else (iOS).  Law Society members in Ontario and British Columbia have free access through their dues (Canada), as do lawyers in a variety of U.S. jurisdictions through their local law library or bar (Social Law, Jenkins, Hamilton County (OH), NY City Bar, etc.).

There are a variety of e-books, law-related podcasts, and magazines available from the iTunes store.  Other publishers, like Emond Montgomery, also have e-books (iOS or Kobo).

All of which assumes you need an app.  If you are on a tablet, you can probably just surf to the site to do your research.  Sites like CanLII in particular are sufficiently simple in design that they work fine on Safari on the iPad or Firefox on an Android tablet. Irwin’s Canadian Online Legal Dictionary, a free Web site, is also tablet accessible – I wouldn’t say friendly, since the navigation requires a smaller finger or a stylus – as a Web site.

[Disclaimers:  my employer is one of the major funders of CanLII, since Ontario's lawyer dues are used, in part, to pay for the free resource.  The book that started this blog is a Thomson Reuters Canada Law Book product.  But you already knew that!]

What If You Can’t Find a Free Version of Your Case?

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Posted in Australia, Canada, CanLII, Case Law, LexisNexis, Search, U.K., U.S. and tagged , ,

Sites like this one often extol the virtues of the many free case law sites on the Web.  But the reality is that the free case law sites are just like their paid peers and no site has a comprehensive collection of every opinion.  Whether they are omitted because of age, failure of the courts to make them available, or editorial decision, not all opinions make it into legal research databases.

What do you do if you can’t find it?  The first thing is to make sure you have simplified your research as much as possible.  If you are using a free site like CanLII or LexisNexis’s free case law, review your search query.  Law librarians can probably all remember a time when a lawyer asked for a case and the party name was incorrectly spelled, or it was in the wrong court.

Before you bail out on the free sites, confirm party names or use just one part of the name (“Dominion”) rather than the entire name (“Dominion Coffee Beans, LTD”).  Just because there is a corporate name doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been abbreviated in some way.  A quick search on CanLII for Dominion Bridge returned 21 cases.  But if you search for Dom’n you get 2 additional cases that do not appear in the original 21.

Some cases de-identify cases, so Smith v. Smith becomes S. v. S.  Your case may be there but just not using the term you are looking for.  The same thing goes for legislation.  Statutes and regulations may have popular names that do not actually appear in the language of the law, and so a search using those will fail.  For example, the USA PATRIOT Act is often called the Patriot Act in Canada, but USA is part of the acronym, not a country identifier.  Focus on the content of the law and see if you can find it by using specific keywords rather than popular names.

The same goes for specific key words in cases and legislation.  If you find that you are searching for a phrase and not getting results, try starting with a single word or two.  Then slowly expand your query to fine tune your results.  This is particularly true when you are using a legal term of art, like “time is of the essence”.  There are good chances that the phrase are used just as expected, but opinions are written by individuals and they may not always use the term in the same way.

One of my favorite examples is marijuana, also known as mary jane, or spelled as marihuana.  If you are looking for cases based on a word that might have multiple spellings, see if your search site allows for wildcards to replace part of the word.  For example, if you search on CanLII for mari*uana, with an asterisk replacing the j or h, you will retrieve cases with both spellings.

If you still can’t find the case, call a law librarian and see if they can help you.  Many Canadian provinces and U.S. states have law libraries that serve the local or provincial bars.  Academic law libraries take calls from alumni.  See if someone can confirm that the case isn’t available for free, and perhaps direct you to an alternative site with the case or provide the case to you directly.

Search Across Many Sources with WebMynd

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Posted in Add-on, CanLII, Case Law, Content, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Screencast, Search, Social media, Twitter and tagged ,

There are a number of search tools that will retrieve results from more than one location.  Google is a great example, where the results display relevant images or even Youtube videos.  Google Mail can search Google Docs and Google Sites at the same time.  WebMynd expands those possibilities across other Web sites, search tools, and accounts to retrieve content from a variety of sources.

When you search using Google after installing their add-on, a small vertical bar will appear on the right side of your screen.  It is populated with a variety of sites that can be searched, from news to shopping to personal productivity and social media.

Webmynd have developed free Web browser plug-ins for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari to enable the search bar.  There is even a version for Microsoft Internet Explorer, but when I tried it, it was missing connections to some of the resources I would use the most, like Google Mail.

This is actually a custom search bar, geared as much to publishers who want to create their own tool for their users as Webmynd’s.  In fact, the developers are focusing in other areas, so if you don’t see a resource that you can use out of the box or tweak, this probably isn’t something you want to follow up.

You can install the custom Webmynd search bar I created, utilizing many of the prebuilt sources from Webmynd (Google Mail, Docstoc, Quora, Twitter, etc.) and supplementing with my own law-related sites:  a couple of the Legal Information Institutes, JDSupra, and so on.   The Webmynd search bar works great if there is a single search box on the site you’re trying to use.  If there isn’t, it seems to choke.  Also, since most of the LIIs block indexing of their case law for privacy reasons, you are limited to legislative results.  Likewise, Google Custom searches, even using search boxes anchored by domain names like Feefiefoefirm.com, weren’t usable.

Here’s what it looks like in action (4 minutes, Youtube.com)

Find How Frequently Your Cases are Cited

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Posted in Canada, CanLII, Case Law, Google, U.S., Westlaw and tagged , ,

Google Scholar provides information about how often an article is cited by other articles in the Scholar universe.  Type in a query like feasibility and viability of the digital library in the private law firm and you will see that the article was cited by 14 others.  (Yes, I know, shameless self promotion!)

Now you can see the same information on Google Scholar’s case law search.  An advanced search on Arkansas cases using the word accretion resulted in a half dozen cases.  Clicking on the first one shows the case, but a new tab is there, called How Cited.  Click it to see the other cases in the Google database that refer to the case.

Arkansas case on Google Scholar

Search result on Google Scholar showing Arkansas case on accretion with citation results

This is a popular feature.  Westlaw Canada just announced that it had citation frequency for its cases, and CanLII has offered a similar function on its cases for some time.  You can run a search on Canadian case law and then sort by most cited.

My favorite of the citation frequency tools remains Fastcase’s Interactive Timeline, which gives you a visual of where your case sits within the entire universe of Fastcase’s database.

Interactive Timeline shows legal research case law citation frequency

Interactive Timeline shows legal research case law citation frequency

[ Google Scholar via Slaw.ca ]

How Many Copies of That Case Do You Need?

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Posted in Australia, Canada, CanLII, Case Law, U.K., U.S., Wolters Kluwer and tagged ,

I was reading an interesting piece on commoditization (fascinating history of the toaster!) which made me think about the many options for primary law available on the Web.  Fee-based publishers take this public domain content and add editorial information to it, but at its heart, a case is a case.

When I think of the legal publishing market and case law, I usually think of it in three tiers, of relatively comprehensive national coverage.  First, there is the free tier, with sites like the Legal Information Institutes (Cornell for the US, CanLII, BAILII, AustLII, WorldLII, etc.).  Usually accessible with a search and ability to browse, each of these sites has a relatively shallow collection of case law, depending on funding and ability to collect older content.

CanLII is an interesting duck, actually.  It is more of a hybrid between the first and free tier and the second or middle tier.  The middle tier isn’t free.  They are substantially less expensive than Westlaw or LexisNexis or other online legal resources, and they have far less content.  They tend to be competitive, though, on case law.  These products are primarily in the US, and include Fastcase.com (and its free version at Public Library of Law), Wolters Kluwers Loislaw, Versuslaw.  Some other sites include Justis (UK) and Casetrack (UK) and the free Jade (Aus) (here are my thoughts on Jade).

Many lawyers are paying for access to one of these mid-tier services already.  Canadian lawyers underwite the cost of CanLII, even though it is available for free to the public.  The stable funding source may explain why it has a citator-like tool, called Reflex, and other enhancements.  Lawyers in small firms in Saskatchewan and many lawyers  in Ontario can get free access to LexisNexis from their desktops as well, supported by their membership dues.

US lawyers are likely to have access to Fastcase, which is a member benefit at 19 bar associations, or Casemaker, available at more than 20 bar associations but without a consumer version.  Collexis has rolled out a version for law students and faculty at CasemakerX.

When you are reviewing your case law options, or if you are looking outside your normal jurisdiction, consider that you may already be paying for one or more online services through your member dues to your professional association or could get access to an inexpensive alternative.