CanLII Connects – Start Taking Your Research to the Next Level

Are you using CanLII Connects for your legal research?  CanLII Connects is a phenomenal website that features high-quality legal commentary and summaries of Canadian court decisions.  It’s a continually growing source of authoritative legal commentary that is free, accessible, and open to anyone.  Currently, the site boasts summaries of thousands of Canadian decisions dating back to the 1800s.

CanLII Connects is more than just a website.  It’s a community resource.  It brings together members of the legal community and provides a space to share their analysis and opinions of court decisions.  The commentary found on CanLII Connects is created by members of the legal community.  Only qualified members of the legal community and registered users of this site are permitted to post.  This maintains quality.

From the homepage, summaries can be quickly sorted by jurisdiction, date, or author.  This makes it easy to find summaries from a particular province or contributor.  Each summary is linked directly to the full text case on CanLII.  Conversely, cases on CanLII are linked to any summaries available on CanLII Connects.

CanLII Connects has made big waves and received some prestigious awards including the Canadian lawyer Magazine’s Readers’ Choice Award and the Canadian Law Blog Award.

The Law Society of Saskatchewan Library has been a major supporter of CanLII Connects since it was launched in April 2014.  To date, the Law Society Library has submitted almost 25,000 summaries of Saskatchewan court decisions to CanLII Connects.  This represents our entire collection of case digests.  As you may know, the Law Society Library employs a number of contract digesters to summarize and digest Saskatchewan court decisions.  These digests appear in Case Mail, our popular semi-monthly newsletter, and in the Saskatchewan Cases database.

We have been proud to support CanLII Connects.  It is an impressive endeavour that signifies major changes to the world of legal information and publishing.

[This tip by Alan Kilpatrick originally appeared on the Law Society of Saskatchewan Library’s Legal Sourcery Blog]