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The
easiest way to stay current is to have relevant law pushed to you through alert
services or RSS feeds.
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The commercial publishers allow you to
set up alerts that re-run a search at intervals chosen by you, and deliver
new results. The benefit of these is that they are customized to respond to
a particular research query. However, each time the search is run there is a
notional charge.
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CanLII users can subscribe to an RSS
feed for individual courts, that will notify the user of all decisions
released by that court as they are added to CanLII. However, the feed cannot
be customized to update a particular search.
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Quicklaw |
LawSource |
CanLII |
Other |
| Case law |
Saved searches will periodically run search to
check for new cases |
WestClip will periodically run search to check
for new cases |
RSS feed for
new cases, by court or tribunal |
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| Judicial consideration |
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KeyCite Alert will periodically check for new
judicial consideration |
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| Legislation |
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Quickscribe has
RSS feeds for
BC legislation where particular statutes can be followed.
QP LegalEze
has an
RSS feed for BC legislation, that notifies users of all legislative
changes (which is rather overwhelming). |
Another way to ensure your case law
research is current, is to run a search in the full
text case collections of LawSource, Quicklaw or CanLII. When you do this, be
sure to rank your documents by date to ensure that the most recent ones appear
first.
| The default ranking method on
Quicklaw is
relevancy ranking, and it can easily be changed in your results list to rank by
date, court or jurisdiction. |
| The default ranking method on WestlaweCARSWELL
is by court level and then by reverse chronological order (unless you use
natural language searching, which is ranked by relevancy). The default ranking method
can be changed in the Preferences settings. |
| The default ranking method on CanLII is relevance,
and it can easily be changed in your results list to rank by date or
citation frequency. |
For currency in legislative research, see [insert
reference].
For commentary on the most recent case law, check the
Major Canadian Law Firms page where you can search within the websites
of leading Canadian law firms. Law firm newsletters often publish very
timely commentary on notable recent cases.
There are several Canadian publications and
news sources to help keep your legal knowledge current.
| The Continuing Legal Education Society
of British Columbia publishes digests of British Columbia cases weekly through an
Internet-based service. This is a subscription service. The CLE
website also includes commentary on recent decisions and announcements of
important legislation. |
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Summaries
of recent BC Court of
Appeal judgments are available on the BC Superior Courts website. |
| Eugene Meehan of Lang Michener publishes the
Supreme Court of Canada L@wLetter, providing e-mail summaries of recent
decisions of the court. |
| The BC Courthouse Library Society maintains a current
awareness service on its website, called
What's New, available
through RSS feed. |
| LawSource provides to its subscribers recent case
summaries from the Abridgment Case Digests in several subject areas. |
| Quicklaw publishes NetLetters in several subject areas.
LawNet on Quicklaw contains recent significant cases, available through RSS
feed. |
| Canada Law Book publishes
caseAlert, providing e-mail summaries of recent cases in several subject
areas to subscribers. |
| Lawyer's Weekly is primarily a print publication, but excerpts are available free of
charge from the
Lawyer's
Weekly website and can be subscribed to through an
RSS feed. |
| The Canadian Bar Association publishes
PracticeLink, available through RSS feed. |
| There are several
Canadian legal blogs to which you can subscribe by RSS feed. |
| News feeds from
federal government departments are available by RSS feed. |
| News feeds from the
BC government
are available by RSS feed. |
| Most Canadian legal publishers have an RSS feed
listing their new publications. See
LegalPubs.ca for an
aggregation of those feeds. |
Using RSS to Create and Enhance Current Awareness Services
10 Top Uses for RSS in Law Firms
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