Minutes of the December 11, 2003 conference call

The teleconference was chaired by Frédéric Pelletier and begun at 12:05, Montreal time.

The following members attended: Suzan Baer, Edna Brewster, Anne L. Chesnutt, Martin Felsky, Jennifer Jordan, Rick Leech, Denis Le May, Jane McDonald, Daniel Poulin and Ruth Rintoul.

The agenda was as follows:
1- Update on our current activities;
2- Summary of the last JTAC meeting;
3- Generals comments on the proposed first draft of the case naming standards.

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1- Update on our current activities

Implementation of the neutral citation standard

In Quebec, the pilot project accepted by the Department of Justice for the Court of Appeal will be proposed to this court's justices next January.

In Ontario, things appear to be progressing in the Superior Court of Justice - thanks to Justice Kiteley. The manager of this court's judges library, Ms. Louise Hamel, has inquired about our standards implementation. For the Court of Appeal, the standards were presented last summer by Daniel to Justice Laskin, who seemed very interested in implementing them in his court. The Committee will seek further information in this regard.

Other smaller tribunals and panels across the country have contacted the Committee about the neutral citation. It is very likely that more of them will implement it very soon.

Some Committee members are reporting problems with the tribunal identifiers adopted by certain tribunals. These identifiers do not contain the two-letter jurisdiction prefix, as stated in the standard. To address this kind of problem, the Committee agrees to write a letter to those tribunals and try to "sell" the use of this prefix by informing them of the rationale behind it. We may also suggest that they retroactively correct their citations, if not many decisions are affected. In the future, when this kind of thing is noticed by one of our members, it should be reported to the Committee. Then the secretary will coordinate the efforts to contact the tribunal with, when possible, the help of a CCC member closer to the tribunal.

Implementation of the preparation of judgments standard

The Word template has been ready since last August. It has been tested, debugged and translated into French. Unfortunately, the documentation is not ready yet, so the "developer" version can't be posted on the Web site right now. This will be done as soon as possible. Frédéric is ready to prepare "user" versions for particular courts.

Simple WordPerfect templates have been prepared for SK and NS courts. SK courts responded with many comments, which still have to be looked at.

Rick kindly sent samples of AB judgments to the Committee members. He will also provide the WordPerfect templates used to create them in a few days. Those templates contain very interesting features that could be adapted for other courts.

Frédéric reported that he regularly provides advice to courts and tribunals who, from time to time, ask for assistance with the implementation of the standard.

2- Summary of the last JTAC meeting

The key issues discussed in the last JTAC meeting, held in Kansas City last October, were summarized by Jennifer. Here are the main topics:

• Martin's "Blueprint for the Security of Judicial Information" is ready as a public draft and will be published very soon on the CJC's Website;
• Justice Fran Kiteley presented a discussion paper entitled "Open Courts, Electronic Access to Court Records and Privacy", on which comments may be sent until next February;
• Martin presented his current work on a standard for electronic documents submitted to courts;
• Daniel presented two draft standards, one pertaining to case naming and the other pertaining to the protection of identities in published decisions;
• Discussions were held about the creation of a Canadian center for court technology.

3- General comments on the proposed first draft of the case naming standards

Daniel presented the draft on case naming standard as an attempt to simplify uniform case naming creation. In the current paradigm, the creation of case names is accomplished by publishers and other disseminators of case law, by trained personnel which have a certain level of legal skills. Daniel suggested that the current standards could be simplified and reduced to a five page document if we envision another paradigm, where judges' secretaries or other court staff act as the sole source for case name creation.

This proposal is rising an interesting debate among the Committee members. Many issues are to be considered, including:

• All courts and tribunals may not have enough resources to invest in the creation of case names;
• We can consider the multiple tier case name creation method used in AB Courts, where judges' secretaries assign case names that are then checked by other court personnel who have additional training, and then confirmed by a legally-trained person;
• With regard to the protection of identities, the use of initials in the case name must be standardized;
• With the neutral citation, uniformity in case naming may not be as important as it was before;
• Simplification is a good thing, but can it be done at the expense of accuracy and consistency?

The Committee agreed that more discussions need to be held with regard to the purposes and objectives of case naming, before discussing the details of the proposed draft standard. Frédéric asked the members to submit their point of view in writing. He will coordinate written discussions on this topic before the next conference. Frédéric will also invite representatives from other case law publishers - namely MLB, CLB and CCH - to participate in this discussion.

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Our next conference call will take place on Wednesday, January 28, 2004 at noon (Montreal time). As usual, a reminder of the access numbers and an agenda will be sent to members by e-mail a few days prior to the meeting.

The meeting ended at 13:20.

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