2020–2023 Strategic Plan

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Vision CanLII seeks to improve access to legal information for both professional users and the public, and we aim that by the end of this plan:

CanLII’s content will be responsive to the majority of the legal information needs of legal professionals;

CanLII will have improved how it learns from and about its users in order to make sure CanLII is responsive to the needs of the legal community and the public;

Using that knowledge, the needs of users who are not legal professionals will have been better understood, and CanLII will have developed content and features to meet those needs;

In Canada, there will be a cultural shift to seeing legal secondary materials as open by default.

Mission CanLII is an organization that strategically curates, produces, and uses open legal information to assist in providing answers to legal research questions. Using its unique position as a not-for-profit organization, CanLII builds an innovative model that improves how members of the legal community use and create content, and how the public navigates complex legal information. CanLII’s technology empowers the legal community by allowing its members to integrate legal information into their practices and by giving them the tools they need to navigate the evolving legal system.

Context In founding CanLII in 2001, the Federation of Law Societies of Canada brought about a fundamental change in the circulation and use of legal information since the 1970s, when the first computerized Canadian legal information databases appeared. Before CanLII, legal professionals had to

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pay costly fees to access primary law online, and the public had almost no access to primary law outside publicly accessible law libraries.

Working with its partner (and now subsidiary) Lexum, CanLII created an efficient and sustainable model for providing access to a growing collection of decisions and legislation. All of this is available for approximately $42 annually per law society members (outside Québec) as opposed to hundreds of dollars monthly per user for commercial subscription services providing comparable content. Today, many legal professionals tell us that not only do they use CanLII first, but that they rely almost entirely on CanLII for their legal information needs.

Over the years covered by this plan, we propose to continue to excel in the publication of primary law and significantly expand CanLII’s collection of secondary materials, and going forward, we will seek to identify legal questions that need answers and to develop or obtain content that responds to these questions. Content will become the means by which we reach our goal instead of being the goal in and of itself. This means that instead of saying “we need to add this historical collection of cases because it’s a gap in our coverage” we will ask ourselves “what kind of questions are our users looking for answers to and what do we need to add to answer these questions?”. By asking our user community what they need to be successful legal researchers, we seek to align our goals with theirs.

Last but not least, CanLII’s success is largely based on its philosophy (and that of Lexum) to be more productive than competitors by leveraging technology to deliver a leading service while limiting overhead. Technology is at the core of what we do, and this is a key reason for the acquisition of Lexum. With this plan, CanLII will continue to be the most innovative player in the field and will become the public facing showcase of the law societies’ ability to innovate and continuously improve the quality of the services offered in the name of the law societies’ public interest mandate.

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Objective 1 Content, Technology and Features

1(a) Intermediate to advanced researchers will be able to find answers to 80% of their legal research questions.

1(b) The legal community will benefit from increased access to open legal resources supported by CanLII’s reliable and sustainable publishing platform, which will be seen as authoritative by the legal community and beyond.

1(c) Researchers will have access to state-of-the-art features and integration of technology and content, the whole while keeping CanLII’s operational expenses relatively stable by leveraging Lexum’s innovative software and Lexum’s work in artificial intelligence (deep learning).

Discussion

The core of CanLII’s content, technology, and feature strategy will shift from “providing free access to law” to “providing answers through open access content”.

Commentary The core of our plan is to build an efficient legal commentary publishing system that is capable of developing original content, stimulating the development of new materials, and pursuing existing sources of content that have not been published openly yet. We will use analytics to identify the legal questions that need answers, and obtain or create content that responds to these questions.

Since CanLII’s creation, the building of a commentary collection has been discussed as one of its ultimate goals and we made steps in that direction with CanLII Connects and the commentary collection of more than 6,000 individual pieces now available on CanLII.org.

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This has led to unprecedented open access to legal commentary, but the future of this organization is to push further. Just as CanLII’s founders took issue with the fact that publicly funded primary law was only available through costly services, we need to take issue today with the fact that access to secondary legal material is also hidden behind technical and financial barriers.

Absurdly, the development of the content in these services is funded by legal professionals in the first place. Buyers of legal information are stuck in a cycle where the legal profession writes content, gives it to publishers in exchange for frequently modest royalties, and then buys it back at a large margin, mostly through subscriptions. In the case of much academic writing that is not open access, legal professionals and public institutions are buying back content that was funded by taxpayers, and future legal professionals through law school tuition. The public has little access to these materials, even though they paid for them to be created.

The only way to break the publishers’ hold on legal information is to create an alternative. CanLII can provide this alternative with an open, immediate, and reputable online platform that supports authors looking to advance their reputation and help their peers. The profession already writes this content, and the key is to establish open access as a core value of the community as opposed to a model where submitting a text to a for-profit publisher is, for lack of a credible alternative, authors’ default reflex.

CanLII has already changed the culture around primary law to make it open by default, and we are in a good position to do the same for secondary resources. We will learn about the collaborative development of quality materials from the experiences of the open access community and successful adoption of open education resources (OER) in the education system.

Primary Law Historically, CanLII has focused the bulk of its energy on building a comprehensive collection of primary law. This is where the greatest need

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was, and users have continued to request more of this content in recent surveys.

The courts started sending current case law directly to CanLII in the early 2000s (the exact year for each court varies), and CanLII has organically built a collection of 15–18 years of current case law. Even discounting the numerous historical scanning projects CanLII proceeded to over the years, this “organically grown” collection is sufficient to meet a significant proportion of user needs, considering that citation analysis shows that fewer than 2% of decisions remain relevant 15 years after being issued. CanLII is also the only open resource that aggregates legislation from all Canadian jurisdictions, and we excel at this. Primary law will continue to be the bedrock on which we build, and what we link to and from other content.

In recent years, CanLII has opted for a more practical approach to historical case acquisition. We now identify cases in the most important law reports that continue to be cited instead of aiming to get every decision ever published in Canada. This way, we maximize the return on investment of the historical cases we add to the collection rather than spending money on cases that data have shown to be less helpful to our users. We do this by leveraging technology and process improvements that Lexum has developed and that significantly bring down the costs of historical scanning projects.

That being said, we recognize the need for long-term preservation and access to Canada’s legal heritage. In an environment with fewer resource constraints, we see benefit in being historically comprehensive, and we will continue to contemplate these projects and see if they can be financed through third-party funding.

Technology and Features CanLII uses excellent technology and features to serve its users. Our speed and reliability are unrivalled, and no other player in the field is close to being able to handle as much traffic while providing such a quantity of content. Surveys mark us as a leading player for site interface and features.

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With the launch of Lexbox on CanLII in 2017, CanLII started to move from being a website with little to no customization, to a practice tool with the ability to save documents and searches and create alerts. This has been a great success, and Lexbox now has more than 23,000 users. We will continue this progress by increasing the integration of CanLII into users’ practices. Lexum has been working on developing AI-based search systems using deep learning. The product of that innovative work will be integrated into CanLII as new research tools in the years covered by this plan.

More generally, to continue improving our features, we plan to identify what tools would be the most help to our users and to develop new tools based on the outcome of that research.

Objective 2 Improving Understanding of Users, Especially Non-Professionals

2(a) We will better help the public in furtherance of the law societies’ public interest mandate by developing a plan for the improvement of CanLII’s interfaces, features, and content, based on a review of our publishing and content development practices.

2(b) We will be more responsive to users’ needs and have a better understanding of the impact of our activities by becoming a more data-driven organization that will identify and measure key metrics.

Discussion

The strategic development of primary law, commentary, and professional features, are all directly in line with CanLII’s traditional overarching objectives, and we know that area fairly well. While we know many members of the public use CanLII’s sites and content, we know relatively little about how they use them, and how we can support them better. We will develop

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tools, methods, and partnerships, to improve our understanding of these issues.

More broadly, we will develop the right tools to be able to collect data and feedback for use in decision-making in all the projects undertaken by the organization. By focusing our strategy towards research and data driven objectives, we can identify information sources, methods of analysis, and new practices that will help us better understand all users.

Objective 3 Policy and Roadmap for Deeper Transformation

3(a) Access to publicly funded legal information will be improved, through our work to continually advance and promote policy objectives.

3(b) The needs and habits of younger generations of users will be addressed in our vision for the long term future of legal information.

Discussion

Policy In line with our intervention before the Supreme Court of Canada in the Keatley v. Teranet matter, we will continue to live by CanLII’s founding statement of principles in the “Montreal Declaration on Free Access to Law” and advance policy to push for greater access to publicly funded legal information for everyone, including other organizations that want to build competing legal information systems.

Privacy is increasingly used as an argument to limit access to these materials, and some authors have pleaded for an effort to maintain the same degree of “friction” in accessing personal information contained in legal documents posted online as researchers experienced when accessing paper records. While recognizing that there’s a balance to be struck in this delicate matter,

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CanLII won’t allow for a return to a more opaque system where decisions from courts and tribunals are hidden from the eyes of the public.

Roadmap for the Future Newly sworn legal professionals have used new media to learn and communicate in ways that their predecessors did not. As a result, we hope to redefine what it means to operate a “legal information” institute by expanding the types of content that we curate, create, and organize, beyond text.

Alternative formats like tables, flowcharts, videos, audio content, graphs, illustrations, timelines, etc. can sometimes be better ways to educate people about legal concepts than text. Thinking outside of the traditional ways of conveying information, and supporting new and evolving formats and content, will extend the reach of learning opportunities for CanLII users.

Over the course of this plan we will experiment with these new media and collaborate with other organizations, both inside and outside the legal sphere, who deal with the same questions about the future of information and learning in general. At the end of the plan, we will present a roadmap for the future of legal information based on what we have learned.

Funding Needs and Law Society Fees Assuming no unforeseen material negative events and regular yearly increases in the total number of FTEs, this plan does not ask for a significant increase in the per FTE fees. Certain projects may require more resources and could lead to small increases to the per FTE fees but, as is now regular practice, yearly budgets will be presented to the Federation’s Finance and Audit Committee and any proposed increase will be explained.

Part of our plan is to develop capacity to fund projects through grant applications to different organizations in the legal system, including foundations and government, and we started doing this in 2018. Any help

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from the law societies in identifying these opportunities and helping us move forward will help us achieve our goals at the lowest possible cost.

By the end of this plan, the initial term of the financing for the Lexum deal will be over, and while there will still be outstanding amounts to be paid (since the 5-year-term loan signed on closing day was amortized over 10 years) we will likely be in a position to obtain financial advantages from the acquisition, for instance dividends to CanLII as shareholder (subject to obtaining appropriate legal and tax advice to select the right vehicle, and assuming no negative tax consequences). This could provide a new source of revenue, and lower the costs of operating CanLII.

Lastly, beyond financial matters, law societies’ contribution can be a powerful catalyst to our efforts and we hope that by approving this plan, law societies also agree to be active participants, for instance by:

providing incentives to their members who contribute content, adopting and favouring open resources in their own processes, for

instance in bar admission classes and CLE/CPD programs, helping us identify needs and opportunities in their jurisdictions, and helping us connect with potential sources of content.