In the early
days of online legal research, when everything was uncertain, governments and law societies were legitimately concerned about the prospect of foreign ownership of Canadian legal information.
While no one at that time really could foresee the future
of online legal research in Canada, in retrospect, everyone should have expected that the natural «Canadian» predisposition to reconcile differences would produce a solution that would reflect everyone's interest, offend almost no one,... [more]
Despite that, there are also recent decisions where courts do allow recovery
of online legal research costs (by the winning party against the losing party or by a law firm against their client) where the research was necessary and the cost reasonable and the search done for that specific client on a specific issue.
While no one at that time really could foresee the
future of online legal research in Canada, in retrospect, everyone should have expected that the natural «Canadian» predisposition to reconcile differences would produce a solution that would reflect everyone's interest, offend almost no one, and do the job as well as, if not better than, is done anywhere else.
These include copyright issues affecting legal research and writing,
recovery of online legal research costs, selecting and acquiring legal resources, knowledge management for lawyers, confidentiality issues and Internet research, and legal research and writing malpractice.
He promoted the
use of online legal research by providing free access to Quicklaw to law professors, law students, and the judiciary, in the expectation that students would become paying subscribers to Quicklaw when they started to practice law.
It is our honor to recognize the life and work of Mr. James McSwiney, former CEO of the Mead Corporation who was at the
helm of the online legal research company that later became LexisNexis after it was purchased in 1968.
Don't nickel and dime your clients: when setting your rates — whether you bill by the hour, charge a flat fee, or use any other billing arrangement — take into account all of your overhead — including the cost
of your online legal research subscription.
The invention of Lexis by Mead in the early 1970s and the eventual rapid
growth of online legal research during the 1980s had a limited impact on law libraries.
With the
rise of online legal research (West, Lexis, etc.), attorneys and paralegals have access to voluminous case law, including unpublished opinions.
Let's compare this to the classic (and still dominant)
model of online legal research, into which we can lump tax research by attorney and non-attorney practitioners without doing much damage to the concept.