B. Advantages and Disadvantages of Online Commercial Databases

• Author: Ted Tjaden
• Profession: National Director of Knowledge Management McMillan LLP
• Pages: 138-140

Page 138

There are a number of fairly obvious advantages to using online law-related databases for legal research compared to using print resources:

· Current information: The delay that occurs in publishing law-related material in print or CD-ROM is ordinarily eliminated with online databases, which can be updated instantaneously. For example, rather than publishing annual or monthly cumulative supplements in print for updates to legislation, commercial publishers can update their legislative databases more often, providing the researcher with current, cumulative versions of legislation.

· Scope of coverage: Publishers of online legal databases are increasingly broadening the scope of their databases by adding more judgments and a wider variety of material, including full-text legal books, journals, and encyclopedias. In addition, the commercial online databases may in some situations be the only convenient source for unpublished case law.

· Full-text searching: Historically, print law-related material in Canada has not been well indexed, sometimes making it more difficult than it should be to find relevant material in print. Online legal research, however, allows the researcher to search for the single or multiple occurrence of a particular word or phrase within a case or statute, something that cannot be done using print resources. Since most information in online databases is in full text, and since most of these databases have relatively sophisticated search engines, it is possible to conduct both fairly exhaustive research and quite specific or narrow research on specific terms.

· Noting up: The major commercial legal databases provide sophisticated online citators that allow a legal researcher to note up cases quickly and accurately for judicial history and judicial treatment. Due to the volume of case law, it is becoming difficult, if not impossible, for legal publishers to publish their citators in print format. As such, expect to see a movement towards case law citators being available only in electronic format.

· Reliability: The vendors of online legal databases and sources of law-related information in electronic format retain very high levels of quality and editorial control, thereby making the content of their databases very reliable. This gives online legal databases an advantage over other material found for free on the Internet, although the trade-off in favour of reliability is the cost of online commercial

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