Advocate Jan 2014

38 VOL. 72 PART 1 JANUARY 2014
THE ADVOCATE
WHAT DO YOU GET FOR $35?
Among lawyers, whether they use CanLII every day or only rarely, it is hard
to imagine that many would suggest $35 per year is too steep a price to pay
for 24/7 unlimited access to pan-Canadian current legislative and case law
collections. To those who might object, or at least emit an unconvinced harrumph,
I ask whether that contribution is an acceptable per-lawyer price for
the profession to extend the free availability of law to their fellow citizens
and to anyone else who finds themselves subject to Canadian law. Here, I
hope to reduce the naysayers down to a more manageable number and rely
on the following facts and data to make my case of good value for the money.
The full CanLII database contains over 1.2 million documents, approximately
10 per cent of which emanate from a dozen B.C. courts and major tribunals.
Decisions from B.C. courts are sent directly to CanLII from the courts
at the same time and through the same process as with other publishers, but
as CanLII can generally process, integrate and post a judgment within hours
of receipt, decisions can often be found on CanLII on their date of issue. With
approximately 60,000 Supreme Court and Court of Appeal judgments, CanLII
offers a near-complete continuous collection from 1990 to the present. For
the years between 1976 and 1990, CanLII has a further 6,000 historical cases,
mostly reported and other major cases. Our B.C. legislative database (~2,100
current and historical versions of statutes and regulations) is updated directly
and frequently from the material found on the B.C. laws website.
Importantly, CanLII is not merely a repository; it is a fully functional tool
that puts all these documents in their proper context (including hyperlinked
access to associated cases and legislative materials) and in a forum where
B.C. law is consulted thousands of times every day. Perhaps it cannot (yet)
fully satisfy the needs of legal researchers, but even the courts take notice of
what can (and should!) be accomplished through reliance on CanLII.
For example, online legal research as a “necessary and proper” disbursement
has long been a matter of debate in B.C., with courts and taxation officers
generally predisposed to treating it as unrecoverable unless convinced
otherwise:
[78] I am even more convinced today that the cost of computerised
research is properly an item of overhead than I was in 2001 when I
decided Prevette v. Cusano. In this current electronic age there are even
more resources available (at no cost) for conducting legal research online
than ever before (for example, there is now the CanLII system and our
own courts website—which includes the vast majority of the court’s written
reasons issues since 1999, at least). Therefore absent convincing evidence
that pay-per-use type of computerised legal research was a
necessary adjunct of the prosecution of this case, I will not allow the
claim for these amounts. 1