Advocate Jan 2014

42 VOL. 72 PART 1 JANUARY 2014
THE ADVOCATE
secondary material) and then built CanLII’s 2013 key initiatives
around those priorities.
• Introduced a radically improved search tool that places greater
control in the hands of users and makes it easier to “find” what
they want and need as well as easier to search.
• Carried out a detailed “citation analysis” to identify leading cases
and priority-case coverage periods as well as any other gaps in
CanLII’s case coverage to permit CanLII to ensure maximum benefit
on funds spent adding missing cases.
• Established a platform that makes it easier to add professionalgrade
texts to CanLII.
What We Are Doing
• Acquiring digital copies of tens of thousands of reported cases to
position us to make dramatic improvements to our historical collections
as funds come available.
• Building a brand-new companion website for secondary material
(target launch March 2014) that will initially focus on aggregating
professional development case commentary in the context of an
interactive discussion forum, but will ultimately serve as a publishing
platform for a much wider variety of secondary source material.
• Building relationships with commercial and non-profit organizations
with a view to considerably expanding the value of services
users get from either (the model here is one of synergistic cooperation
with the partner service for the benefit of the user, and not
one where a CanLII service replaces the need for what the other
had on offer).
• Participating in academic research into the semantic analysis of
legal texts.
• Exploring models for supplementary funding as the demands of
today’s sophisticated user of legal information call for development
at costs and at a pace that may exceed the appetite of
CanLII’s traditional funders.
• And, recently, hiring a Vancouver-based manager of content and
partnerships to keep all these great projects going!
Where We Go Next
The audacity of the original CanLII project and the success that followed as
a result of the will and support of the law societies provides the lesson that