The greatest revolution in law over the last 30 years has been
the ability to access case law and secondary sources online. When I
started law school at Osgoode Hall Law School in 1987, we were all
given access to Quicklaw, an online research tool that at the time
was promoted as allowing the legal research to retrieve unreported
cases.
Today, there are competing commercial online research tools
offered by LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer and others,
and a publicly accessible online research tool managed by the
Federation of Law Societies of Canada called CanLII. Conducting
searches on CanLII is entirely free.
The ability to access a case for free certainly raises questions
about online legal research disbursement costs that are sometimes
claimed in an action. In the recent Nova Scotia case of
Kaehler v. System Care Cleaning & Restoration Ltd.,
2020 NSSC 32, the issue of the defendant's ability to
claim “e-Carswell search / Online Legal Reseach
