The Law Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador is dedicated to supporting access to justice and the dissemination of legal knowledge.
In line with this mission, it funded a major initiative to make historical court decisions from Newfoundland and Labrador (rendered before 2003) freely available on the CanLII website.
Lexum was commissioned to identify, scan, process, and publish these decisions, ensuring their full integration into Canada’s digital legal corpus.
+4,600 decisions and 40,000 pages
now freely accessible to the public
💡 Note
Created by the Law Society of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Law Foundation funds initiatives that improve public understanding of the law, expand access to justice, and support the effective functioning of the legal system.
By supporting this project, the Foundation helped preserve an essential part of the province’s legal heritage while promoting equal access to legal information for citizens, researchers, and legal practitioners.
Turning Paper Archives into Accessible Digital Resources
Before this project, decisions issued before 2003 existed only in print, scattered across law report volumes held in a limited number of libraries.
These decisions — essential for understanding the evolution of Newfoundland and Labrador’s legal system — were not accessible online to the public or the legal community.
To close this gap, the Law Foundation provided a grant to CanLII to fund the full digitization of these materials.
Lexum’s mandate was to:
- Identify all missing decisions from 2003 back to 1987;
- Locate the best printed sources to ensure content accuracy;
- Digitize the documents with precision;
- Convert and structure the text into reusable formats (Word, HTML, PDF);
- Publish the full collection on the CanLII website, following the highest standards of documentary quality and uniformity.
Create a complete digital collection from decades-old printed volumes — while ensuring accuracy and consistency with the rest of CanLII.
A Complete Digitization Workflow, from Identification to Publication
- Identifying and Preparing Source Materials
Lexum began by querying the CanLII citator to identify all cited decisions that were still absent from the website.
This step produced an exhaustive list covering more than 16 years of jurisprudence.
Printed volumes were then located and borrowed from local law libraries and supplemented with Lexum’s own law reports archive.
2. Digitization and Quality Control
Chaque décision a été scannée individuellement à partir des sources originales.
Un contrôle qualité systématique a suivi : toutes les images ont été vérifiées pour détecter d’éventuelles pages manquantes ou mal scannées.
3. Text Conversion and Content Structuring
PDF images from the scanner were converted to digital text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
After careful proofreading, each decision was formatted based on a Microsoft Word template designed specifically for the project.
Proprietary elements — summaries, headnotes, editor’s notes, headers and footers — were removed so that only the official reasons for decision remained.
Key metadata (court name, docket number, neutral citation, date) was extracted and standardized, and paragraph numbering was added where necessary.
4. Publication and Integration on CanLII
Once validated, the decisions were published on canlii.org.
A final review ensured citation consistency and linked each trial-level decision to its corresponding appeal, where applicable.
In total, this work extended CanLII’s coverage of Newfoundland and Labrador superior court decisions back from 2003 to 1987 — a gain of 16 years of digital archives.
Interface of the CanLII website displaying Newfoundland and Labrador decisions. Users can now freely access thousands of historical decisions that were previously available only in print, thanks to the digitization and publication carried out by Lexum.
Concrete Benefits for Access to Justice
- Preserving Legal Heritage
This project safeguarded thousands of historical decisions and integrated them into Canada’s digital legal network, ensuring their long-term availability and preservation.
- Increased Accessibility for All
Citizens, lawyers, judges, and researchers now benefit from free online access to the entire body of case law from Newfoundland and Labrador — without cost or geographic barriers.
- Harmonization and Transparency
The digitized decisions follow the same metadata and formatting standards as other CanLII content, ensuring national consistency in legal research and citation.
A Collaborative Model for Modernizing the Law
The project led by Lexum for the Law Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador demonstrates how collaboration between public institutions and legal technology experts can transform access to legal information.
Through this initiative, the province’s jurisprudential heritage was digitized, standardized, and made publicly accessible, contributing to a more open and equitable justice system.
Access Newfoundland and Labrador Decisions on CanLII:
