Legal Research

QL v. Westlaw (and CanLII, too)

By emma wood

At last week’s VALL luncheon, Catherine Best & Teresa Gleave gave a presentation comparing Quicklaw and LawSource (WestlaweCarswell).

Catherine, a research lawyer, covered scope and functionality; Teresa, a law librarian, discussed the practical aspects: pricing, administration, training considerations, cost recovery, etc. Not surprisingly, the session was well-attended and well-received. They did a fantastic job of giving an impartial review of the two tools and made an effort to compare apples to apples, which isn’t always easy to do.

Catherine’s presentation, entitled “Electronic Legal Research: A Moving Target” is available on the VALL website.

What was nice is that Catherine included some tips on when CanLII is a good alternative to the pay sources. I admit it: when the new CanLII interface was unveiled, I really didn’t like it. But it just gets better and better all the time. Now I use CanLII almost daily.

You can use it to search by citation and in many cases, parallel cites are provided. It provides a gorgeous, clean PDF of each case. RSS feeds for each court and tribunal. So I’m glad that Catherine could point out some of CanLII’s newest enhancements: stemming, proximity searching, etc. I wasn’t aware of the proximity searching capability until her presentation, and had occasion to try it out today–it works well.

We all have our favourite tools that we tend to be faithful to, but this presentation gave some great reasons for why we should always be aware of what the “other guys” can do.

Full post as published by Ballad in Plain E on February 28, 2008 (boomark / email).