By Marc-André Morissette, VP Technology
Thanks to websites like CanLII, legal information in Canada is more accessible than ever. Case law, legislation, and doctrine is fully indexed and searchable. But let’s face it. Just because the content is there doesn’t mean it’s easy to find what’s most relevant.
Legal research remains one of the most intellectually demanding tasks, and one of the most time-consuming. And that’s because the sheer volume of information you’re expected to navigate and interpret is enormous. Finding the most relevant material often feels like drinking from a firehose.
Boolean search: powerful, but not for everyone
One of the most effective ways to narrow down your search results on CanLII is with a solid Boolean query. But here’s the reality: most people who use CanLII don’t necessarily know how to craft one, and that’s perfectly normal. Boolean search is powerful, but it isn’t intuitive. To use it well, you need to know how to combine keywords and proximity operators in just the right way to cut through thousands of potential results. Even when you know what you’re doing, building and refining those queries takes time, time you don’t always have.
So, we asked ourselves: what if we could give legal researchers a boost, without asking them to change how they work?
A tool built by Lexum, designed for CanLII, and shaped by real research habits
At Lexum, we’ve spent decades building tools that enable fast, simple and open access to legal information. That mission is what drove us to create CanLII Search+, a new AI-powered feature shaped by real research habits.
The idea behind it is simple. When you open CanLII to begin your research, you’re probably trying to answer a question, not write the perfect search query. Instead of manually assembling keywords and proximity operators, you can now tell CanLII Search+ what you’re looking for in plain language — the way you’d explain it to a colleague. In return, it generates a complete search form, including Boolean operators, tailored to your need, helping you cut through the clutter faster and surface the most relevant results right away.
Of course, getting to a better set of results is only half the battle. Once you have your results, the next challenge is figuring out which documents are actually worth your time. Even with a good Boolean query, you can still end up with hundreds of results. Opening dozens of documents, skimming for relevance, and ruling them out one by one drains time and energy — and unless you’ve got hours to spare, it’s easy to miss something important or overlook the best source.
That’s where Search+’s second key feature comes in: results analysis. With a single click, Search+ gets to work on your search results. It reviews each document, explains how it relates to your original query, pulls out key excerpts with links to specific paragraphs to provide immediate context, and assigns a relevance score from one to five. This helps you quickly prioritize what’s worth reading — and what can wait.
Instead of flying blind, you get a guided view. You’re still the one making the calls — what to read and what to cite — but you’re no longer starting from scratch. You can zero in on the most promising results and move through them with greater confidence and efficiency.
This isn’t AI replacing legal reasoning, it’s AI respecting your expertise
The approach Lexum has taken with Search+ is philosophically different from that of other legal publishers who have tried to build black box automated legal researchers in which the user asks a question and gets a research report with citations a few minutes later.
While we do believe that the idea of an automated researcher is interesting and might even be viable in the future1, we don’t believe that such systems are yet ready to replace human search, both because they are not reliable enough and because there is no easy way to identify shortcomings and recover once they fail.
In the meantime, we believe that the best solution is to stick close to manual research and create AI powered tools that address common pain points. Search+ does that at the two points in the legal research workflow that tend to eat up the most time: formulating the right query and sorting through the results. What we are doing is giving you a tool that respects your time and expertise. It’s here to help with the heavy lifting, so you can focus on the judgment calls, the analysis, and the nuance. The things only you can do.
Try it on your next legal research
CanLII Search+ reflects everything we believe in at Lexum. It accelerates your research, allowing you to focus on the results rather than the minutiae of the query. It’s simple, because you don’t need to learn anything new — just ask a question and see where it takes you. And it’s open, because it’s available to everyone with a free myCanLII account.
It is live, available, and waiting to be put to work. Whether you’re a lawyer, a student, a librarian or someone simply trying to make sense of the law, we built this with you in mind.
So next time you log into CanLII and aren’t sure how to frame your search and want to quickly make sense of a long list of results — give it a try. You might find that the hardest part of your research just got a little easier.
It might not be magic. But it’s the kind of smart, practical help we could all use more of.
- In fact, we are experimenting with these approaches, but we believe that for them to work, we’ll need more robust models than those currently available, and a lot of work in other areas as well. ↩︎
