Legal Research Databases and CD-ROMs
| Author | Ted Tjaden |
| Profession | National Director of Knowledge Management McMillan LLP |
| Pages | 136-154 |
136
CHAP TER 6
LEGAL R ESEARCH
DATABASES AND
CDROMS
A. I NTRODUC TION
The impact of computer technology on the practice of law has been huge.
Its impact on legal research ha s been no less. With computers comes the
capacity to store and search a large body of textual information, which
has given researchers the ability to locate specific term s within that
body of information. There are now a growing number of high quality,
easy-to-use commercial databases for conducting online legal re search.
These subscription databases usually contain one or more of the follow-
ing features: they have sophisticated se arch engines that allow a number
of different ways of finding information; they contain a variety of law-
related in formation, in most situations including case law, legislation,
journal literature, and news; they are ava ilable only by subscription for a
fee; they are increasingly made available to subscribers via the Internet;
and their publishers are constantly making value-added improvements
to these databases, including extra content and easier-to-use interfaces.
For law students, your law school has or can likely obtain pass-
words for you to use some of these databases for academic research.
For lawyers and other professionals, the vendors of these online data-
bases will negotiate access to their databases through one of several
methods (usually hourly rates, flat-rate fees, or transactional fees, the
recovery of which is discussed in Chapter 1, Section C). For members
of the public, short-term access to these dat abases is more difficult, and
it may be necessary to instead either hire a lawyer to conduct research
Legal Rese arch Databases and C D-ROMs 137
on these databases on your behalf or conduct your own legal research
using other resources di scussed in this book.
This chapter will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of con-
ducting legal research using online law-related commercial databases,
followed by a brief review of some of the leading services, discussed
alphabetically by resource in the following three categories:
Comprehensive servicesUÊ :
LexisNexis Quicklaw»
Westl aw Canada»
LexisNexis Quicklaw and Westlaw Canada are included as compre-
hensive services due to the extent of their content for primary and
secondary legal resources, news and other non-legal resources, and
to their domestic and international scope.
Canadian and Civil Law servicesUÊ :
CCH Online»
Canada Law Book/BestCase»
Droit civil en ligne (DCL)»
Maritime Law Book»
Répertoire électronique de jurisprudence du Barreau (REJB)»
Société québécoise d’information juridique (SOQUIJ)»
The strength of the foregoing services is their strong domestic con-
tent (Canadian and Québec), including both primary and secondary
law-related resources, depending on the product.
Specialized servicesUÊ :
Criminal Spectrum»
DisclosureNet»
HeinOnline»
Justis.com»
Kluwer Arbitration Online»
Labour Spectrum»
PrivaWorks»
Tax net PRO»
Westlaw Business»
The foregoing services offer speciali zed content for Can adian legal re-
searchers, depending on the focus of the research being conducted.
Although CD-ROM s are now an old-fashioned tec hnology (and grad-
ually falling into disuse), legal publishers are still offering CD-ROMs for
some of their products. As such, law-related CD-ROMs are briefly re-
viewed at the end of this chapter.
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