Legal Research

Research Tip: New CanLII Highlighting Feature

Posted on by Jennifer Walker

While we were preparing for the holidays and wrapping up those last minute reference questions in 2016, a cool new feature was quietly rolled out in CanLII – so quietly that we didn’t even notice until last month! If you’re a regular user of CanLII, you’ll want to check this out.

Highlighting terms within CanLII has always been a handy feature. If you’re performing a keyword search, CanLII will highlight where the words appear in the document you select and read from your search results, allowing you to scroll through the text to find those terms. Now, you can edit those terms right from within your search!

 

As in this photo, the keyword search was for “Constructive Dismissal.” The instances of that phrase in the document are highlighted in blue. Now, if you wanted to add another word or phrase, you can click on the little pencil icon next to the down arrow…

 

And a box will open, allowing you to type in another word or phrase! Hit enter… Continue reading →

Research Tip: Using Google to Site Search

Posted on by Brenda Lauritzen

In the course of online legal research (especially legislative) it’s not uncommon that you come across a website’s built-in search engine that refuses to cooperate with what you want it to do. Whether that be a lack of filters, spurious results, or just a bad user interface, there are many offenders (especially, sadly, on our government websites). This at best can lead to frustration and at worst to wasting hours of time not being able to find what you’re looking for. Fortunately, there’s a underused method to leverage Google’s search engines to assist, which I’ll detail below.

But let me start by giving an example. Say we’re looking for Hansard Debates or Committee Proceedings on the Ontario Legislative Assembly website that discuss the Police Services Amendment Act of 1997. I was able to pull up the page for the bill, as seen below, but I unfortunately soon discover that the Act was earlier than when they start directly linking out to any related debates or committee reports from that page.

Knowing, however, that they do have the Debates and Committee Documents online dating back to at least the 1970s, there must be a way to find them. You could try using their built-in search engine at the top right, or even their Advanced Hansard search, but by doing so I’ve usually found myself wading through multiple long documents, most of which do not pertain to what I am looking for.

Fortunately, there’s a quicker way, and Google can be used to do a lot of the heavy lifting here. You can easily narrow a generic Google search to search only a single website. To do this, in a regular google search just type in:

site:http://www.ontla.on.ca/ police services act 105

This will search all of the Ontario Legislative Assembly’s website for the keywords Police Services Act and 105 (I used the bill number to narrow it down from other amending acts). Voila, you can see below our more relevant results linking directly to committee reports, in the usual Google format we are familiar with.

You can do this with any website whose search engine might not be the best. Just use:

site:[url] [keywords]

And let Google do its thing.

Lexis Advance Quicklaw Updates

Posted on by Jennifer Walker

If you use Lexis Advance Quicklaw at the CCLA Library (or any of the other Ontario courthouse libraries), you may be delighted to hear about some of the new content included in our subscription. As of the beginning of the year, we now have access to a considerable amount of international case law. Available at no additional cost to you, you can now download decisions from the following case collections:

  • All England Law Reports
  • Northern Ireland Law Reports
  • Scottish Civil Law Reports
  • European Court of Human Rights Cases
  • Australian Law Reports
  • New Zealand Law Reports
  • U.S. Decisions from the Supreme Court, Appeal Courts, and District Courts
  • And more!

As always, you’ll have to come into the library to make us of this subscription (no remote access, we’re afraid), or you can get in touch and we’ll see how we can help you remotely. Also, if you’d like some training on using Quicklaw (remember: there’s a new platform interface!), we’ll be holding a training session on March 22nd here in the library. You can RSVP for this free session at this link.

CCLA Compendium of Damages Awarded in Personal Injury Actions Across Ontario – October 2016 Update

Posted on by Jennifer Walker

This one is hot off the press! Just this morning, we were sent the latest update to our Compendium of Damages Awarded in Personal Injury Actions Across Ontario. This guide has been produced for the CCLA for several years, with the assistance of students from the University of Ottawa law school, and under the leadership of The Honourable James Chadwick. This year’s update was prepared by Caleb Timmerman – we thank him tremendously for his work on the project!

To check it out, please click here. For your future reference, you can find this publication on the CCLA website under our “Civil Litigation” practice portal.

Also, if you’re looking for the CCLA’s Compendium of Costs, our most recent update is from 2013 – you can find that here.

Provincial Statutes Now Available in HeinOnline

Posted on by Brenda Lauritzen

I am far too overly excited to see that historical Provincial Statutes are now available in HeinOnline!

It seems coverage varies between the provinces, but it is fairly extensive thus far and the quality of the pdf scans in HeinOnline are always top notch. Ontario in particular looks to have everything back to 1867. For those needing to do historical legislative research from the comfort of their own office desks, this is excellent news!

inside-provincial

Ontario lawyers have free remote access to HeinOnline through the Law Society. Email us for your password!

 

Searching Federal Hansard Debates

Posted on by Brenda Lauritzen

Way back when I did a post about how to search through the Ontario Hansard Debates online, I made a note to myself to follow up with a companion Federal Debates post. This is me following up, after more than a year. Because, well, insert something about dedication (or stubbornness).

As it seems with all things in Canadian Law, online access to the Federal Debates of Parliament (“Hansard”) are scattered across several different websites, and your mileage may vary with each.

  1. Parliament of Canada / LegisInfo – If you’re lucky enough to be dealing with a piece of legislation from 1994 onwards (and the later you go generally the more linked content you will get for each Bill), the main Parliament of Canada website will most likely work well for you. You can trace Bills, click through to their linked debates, and see the reports from related committees.
  2. Canadiana – For earlier debates, use Canadiana.org’s Parliamentary Historical Resources site through the Library of Parliament. This site has the debates from both the Senate and the House of Commons, in both official languages, back to Confederation. The only downside here is that the search engine can be a little finicky. I’ve had the most success with it by narrowing the date range to the date you are interested, and searching the Bill number (not the chapter number of the Act), if you know it.

parl

Like the rest of legislative research, trying to find Legislative Intent is unfortunately not an exact science, but hopefully the above should assist in getting you started. Also, I love doing this kind of research, so please don’t hesitate to let us know should you need assistance! 

Sites Unseen: Ravel Law

Posted on by Brenda Lauritzen

Last year I wrote a post on how to find free online access to American Case Law for us here in Canada. Well let’s add Ravel Law to that list!

While Ravel Law does operate as a subscription-based platform, some of its features, including its case law database, are available for viewing for free online (downloading the case is disabled unless you subscribe, however). It also offers additional features you would not get from the other free sources, such as the ability to visually map out references of a certain case:

ravellaw

Hovering over the different case circles will allow you to visualize which cases refer to which others. You can also narrow by date range or by court, and clicking through to the case on the right will open up the full text for you to view.

While some of its free features are limited, Ravel Law still seems to be a great source for those looking for free access to American case law, and its search visualization features are definitely fun to play around with!

Resource Spotlight: Bullen & Leake & Jacob’s Canadian Precedents of Pleadings

Posted on by Jennifer Walker

Once a month, Robeside Assistance will feature a resource that we purchase for the library that you might not know we have. Our collection is full of great books, databases, programs, and other materials, so definitely visit us in the library if you’d like to use anything mentioned here!

BLJ

If pressed to name our favourite books in the library, Brenda and I would both include Bullen & Leake & Jacob’s Canadian Precedents of Pleadings in our top three. Tucked away in the civil litigation section, this gem of a title seems to always provide just what we need, when we need it. Based on the long-published British book of similar name (Bullen & Leake & Jacob’s Precedents of Pleadings, currently in its 18th edition), this book offers a huge selection of sample pleadings in a wide variety of legal areas. I find myself reaching for this book when asked for sample personal injury pleading examples, and Brenda has used this for the construction pleadings as well. You can take a browse through the impressively detailed table of contents here.  The book came with a CD-ROM, too, which has copies of the precedents contained in the book. No need to re-type – just let us know at the Reference Desk that you’d like to use the CD and you can take home copies of the precedents you that need, ready to be modified.

If you’d like to look through this excellent resource yourself, you can find it in our Texts section at KF 8868.1 B85 2013.

Sites Unseen: Osgoode Digital Commons

Posted on by Brenda Lauritzen

We always keep our eyes out for little-known or used sites that might assist in legal research, which we will feature in our new series: “Sites Unseen”. First up to the plate:

Osgoode Law School Digital Commons

Hands-down one of the most time-consuming legal research tasks is legislative research; that is, trying to trace the law to find out what it looked like in a certain year, updating it with amendments, finding copies of older orders-in-council, etc. It is mostly time-consuming because if you are interested in a year prior to the early 2000s, very little is available online and you will mostly be working with the bulky print volumes of statutes or regulations.

Fortunately, the Osgoode Law School at York University has made considerable strides in assisting in this area and now offers pdfs of Ontario Annual Statutes back to 1970, and Ontario Revised Statutes back to 1914. What is even better, as can be seen below (click to enlarge), is they are broken down into separate pdfs and fully browsable by the individual acts (goodbye 400+ page pdfs!):

osgoodedigitalcommons-1
Statutes are fully browsable by Act

So if you need a copy of an older Ontario Act, bookmark this site and have a look! I use it constantly in my legislative research here, even just to to get a cleaner-looking scan of a particular Act.

They also have digital copies available of all the old Ontario Law Reform Commission reports, something we get questions about as well.

Improved Search Function in WestlawNext Canada

Posted on by Jennifer Walker

There’s an exciting new feature in WestlawNext Canada that we just had to share with our legal research keeners. Brenda and I cheered out loud when this feature launched a few weeks ago, it’s that exciting!

From any page on WestlawNext Canada, you can now do a targeted search by clicking on the “Find” button at the end of the white search box. This will open the “Find Dropdown” template, which is a search box that gives you the option of retrieving materials by case, statute, or regulation name or citation.

The benefit of using this template is that when you know what you’re trying to find on WestlawNext (a certain case, a specific section of an act, etc.), as opposed to running a general keyword search, this will bring those documents up to the top of your results list, and not flood your results with documents you don’t need. Try it out, and let us know how it works for you!