It's about building a community - CanLII's experience in developing, launching and operating new type of secondary legal info resource

Speaker(s):

Colin Lachance

CanLII (Canadian Legal Information Institute)provides free access to current Canadian primary law. It is funded by the legal profession through their dues, but the full scope of its 275 collections and 1.3M documents are equally available to the public at no charge. It is the single most used legal information resource in the country. Among Canadian lawyers, 90% use CanLII and 56% start their case law research on CanLII (results from a 2012 survey).

CanLII is now taking its first step into making secondary legal information resources available.

In early April, CanLII launched "CanLII Connects". This site, which will operate independently from but interconnected with our primary law site, seeks to bring lawyers, scholars and others with professional competency in legal analysis to offer their insights on Canadian case law.

The site itself (and CanLII generally) will be discussed, but the focus of the presentation will be on our process for identifying a need, developing a plan, organizing resources, and (hopefully) successfully building the community needed to sustain and grow the effort.

By the time CALIcon takes place, our site will have been live for two months and we will either be witnessing the anticipated growth or scrambling madly to salvage the effort and our reputation!

No matter how it turns out, I think we will be able to offer some useful lessons.

Slides: