Noting up--best practices or overkill?

• Author: Mireau, Shaunna
• Position: Online Law

Like many of my colleagues, I use best practices for specific recurring research tasks. Yes, I am talking about "noting up". Noting up, for the non-lawyer, is the gathering of judicial or administrative decisions that make reference to a particular case. This is the method for making all the links between cases so that you can understand how an area of law has evolved and what kind of decision is likely to be made in similar circumstances.

Checklists are good tools for the noting up task. I have one for judicial decisions, one for administrative tribunal decisions, and a special checklist for noting up statutes referenced in cases. These checklists are formatted so that they can be attached to a decision and the results of the search, like a report card. There is a column with check boxes, a column with the information source, and a column with the method used for noting up with that source.

The checklists for noting up decisions are linked on my blog at http://mireau.blogspot. corn. I use this blog to quickly inform my users about research items of interest and to provide handy links to items that I will need again with more context than just an Internet bookmark.

I recently noted up a 1986 Alberta Court of Appeal decision on a fairly small point of law. By small I mean not overly litigated yet still significant to our research issue. The case I noted up was mentioned in a previous legal memoranda produced by one of our former articling students back in 2002. The case was reported in the Alberta Report, the Western Weekly Reports, the Alberta Law Reports, and on Quicklaw in the Alberta Justice database, WestlaweCARSWELL, and the National Reporter System. Significantly, it was also mentioned in a key textbook on that area of law.

Because the decision is a key piece of commentary, both on a point of law and the related legislation in the area, I anticipated that there would be some cases since 2002 that cited it. I was correct; two Canadian electronic citation services, QuickCITE and KeyCite, contained three recent cases, one each from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario, which considered my case. Using both QuickCITE and KeyCite is the usual best practice for noting up a decision in my research. Occasionally, if a decision is extremely important to an argument, I will follow other paths to ensure that the lawyer I am gathering information for knows about every piece of history for a case, and those pathways are all on my checklist.

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