CanLII has undergone many improvements in the past year, including the addition of new content and technology.
Dominion Law Reports (DLRs) that are cited in CanLII’s collection were added in the fall of 2016. DLRs from before 1980 are available in a format CanLII refers to as “Spiffy PDFs”: a more efficient method of making historical documents available, with comparable functionality to the HTML format used for more current case law. This is what they look like.
In February, CanLII acquired Lexum, a Canadian legal technologies firm. This partnership enabled improvements to CanLII such as adding LexBox, to save searches and set up alerts for new search results, and Solex, a new search engine which provides faster, more flexible searches. Solex is also compatible with artificial intelligence features that Lexum is exploring to further improve search results.
CanLII has expanded its holdings beyond primary law to include books, law reviews, reports and newsletters amounting to over 1000 pieces of commentary. The display of commentary relies on Qweri, another Lexum creation which converts word documents into a more usable web-friendly HTML format. The commentary section is in addition to CanLII Connects, an open source platform where members of the law community can make their commentary available to everyone.
To read more details on the changes, check out CanLII’s blog post or explore the many resources available on CanLII.