Advocate Jan 2014

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40 VOL. 72 PART 1 JANUARY 2014 THE ADVOCATE partner, at the time a legal laboratory of the University of Montreal and already a long-time online publisher of Supreme Court of Canada decisions and world leader in the burgeoning “free access to law” movement) would establish and operate the site with whatever material could be acquired. At the time, the concept of a “free law” website was well established with successes in the United States (the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University) and Australia (AustLII), but the CanLII project was unique in that it had the benefit of full funding from the legal profession. A year later, the site had 18 collections comprising 20,000 documents, and all law societies were actively carrying out their commitment to expend political capital with the courts, legislatures and Queen’s Printers to acquire the source material needed to, first, serve as a comprehensive base and, ultimately, provide the forward momentum CanLII required to build success upon success. By early 2003, CanLII had 65 collections and 150,000 documents and was adding cases at a rate of 1,000 per week. If the first phase was mostly about building the content, the next phase (2003 to 2007) was about improving the technology, delivering the features and functionality associated with and required for professional use, and responding to an increasingly savvy base of Internet users. Web 2.0 was upon us, and through the continuing support of the law societies and Lexum’s technology, CanLII began to introduce several professional-grade tools such as the Reflex record for case citations, the Satal tool for point-intime comparison of statutes and, more recently, search-based RSS feeds and deep-linking functionality to support sophisticated research and reference practices. As I note in the next section, we are currently taking another major leap forward on the technology side. By 2008, CanLII was well beyond the “project” phase and the law societies saw the next logical step as instituting a governance model better suited to a competitive legal publisher operating in a fast-paced web-only environment. To that end, the law societies established the CanLII Futures Committee. In short order, the committee, under the leadership of B.C. Law Society CEO Tim McGee, gained the approval of the Federation of Law Societies and its members for a streamlined ownership structure (under which the law societies would fund CanLII through the federation instead of directly), revised bylaws, and a recruitment strategy to attract and build an independent and skills-based board of directors. The new board, which included leading professionals and thinkers like Johanne Blenkin (CEO of B.C. Courthouse Libraries) and Michael Geist (University of Ottawa Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-Commerce Law) and new structure, took over in mid-2010 with a mandate to establish
THE ADVOCATE VOL. 72 PART 1 JANUARY 2014 41 CanLII’s strategic vision and plan. The plan 3 was approved by the federation and the law societies in 2011. CANLII 2012 TO 2014 In many ways, today’s environment is no different from the one that gave rise to CanLII in the mid-1990s: • The costs of commercial legal research materials and tools are high and rising. • New digital sources often represent an additional and not a replacement expense to print. • Access to the law and high-quality research tools are necessary to develop and maintain professional competence. • With so many other barriers to access to justice, Canada can ill afford a future that puts a price tag on public access to the law. • There are few stakeholder(s) in the justice system with the wherewithal to improve the status quo. On that basis, I trust I won’t receive much disagreement that CanLII and the support it receives from the legal profession through the law societies remain relevant and necessary. Furthermore, even with all the challenges that remain, the past 15 years have brought about changes that create new challenges. It is in the new context that CanLII developed and has been executing its strategic priorities. What We Have Done • Worked with law foundations, courts and others nationally to add thousands of historical cases to our collections, to reduce the degree to which reliance on commercial databases “just to make sure” is necessary. • Worked with legal publishers and others to bring free access to secondary and explanatory material such as the Lancaster House eText on Wrongful Dismissal and as well as to thousands of case summaries from the likes of Lancaster House, Maritime Law Book and Vancouver’s own Admiraltylaw.com. • Developed and launched an Application Programming Interface (“API”) that permits external developers to build programs and apps that incorporate CanLII content. • Surveyed all law societies (over 4,300 responses) to identify the profession’s priorities (improve search, expand case coverage, add
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Because not everyone is this lucky.
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Advocate Jan 2014

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