FAQ

Based in Montreal, we are a private company that designs technology enabling legal institutions to manage, enrich, and publish their content online.

Our mission: to facilitate fast, simple, and open access to the law

Lexum has been innovating for over 30 years. We began in 1992 by publishing Supreme Court of Canada decisions online, when we were a research group at the Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Law.

Today, Lexum supports more than 100 legal institutions around the world.

In 2000, Lexum began collaborating with the Federation of Law Societies of Canada (FLSC) to create CanLII, now the most widely used legal research platform in Canada.

In 2018, Lexum was acquired by CanLII, a non-profit organization controlled by the FLSC. We continue to design the technology that powers CanLII and to manage the content published on it every day.

Today, all Lexum’s profits are reinvested to support CanLII’s mission: to improve access to Canadian law.

Lexum was founded around 1992 within the Centre de recherche en droit public (CRDP), the public law research centre at the Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Law. In 2006, Lexum became an independent research lab. In 2010, the lab’s lead researchers acquired it through a spin-off and founded today’s company, Lexum Informatique Juridique Inc.

Lexum continues to contribute to the Faculty of Law through the LexUM Chair, which has been funding academic activities in legal informatics for nearly 15 years.

No. Lexum does not draft legal content. The legal materials available on websites we operate are produced and managed by courts, legislatures, regulatory bodies, law societies, and legal publishers we serve.

Our role is to provide the platform, tools, and related services that allow our clients to publish this content online efficiently and securely.

We do not handle requests regarding legal content. For any such questions, please contact the institution responsible for publishing the material.

Our role is to develop and maintain the technology that enables the publication and consultation of legal information. Our clients are responsible for the content they publish using our technology.

Lexum’s legacy products — Decisia, Qweri, and Lexbox — have been merged into Norma, our new all-in-one platform.

All clients of our previous products benefit from a grandfather clause, allowing them to retain the features of their existing plans when renewing their contracts.

Norma is our all-in-one legal publishing platform. It provides clients with an intuitive administration interface for uploading, organizing, enriching, and publishing their legal information within their own environment.

For end users, Norma offers advanced search and navigation tools, ensuring fast, simple, and open access to the law.

Norma is an enterprise platform designed for organizations that manage and make legal information accessible to the public.

You may already have accessed content published through Norma on one of our clients’ official websites. However, Norma is not a legal research platform intended for individual use.

Discover Norma’s tools and features on its dedicated page.

For a deeper look, request an online demo: our team will present the platform, assess your needs, and show you how Norma simplifies your workflows and enhances your organization’s efficiency.

Norma’s pricing options are not listed online.

To obtain a personalized quote, request a demo: our team will showcase the platform, discuss your needs, and propose the most suitable solution for your organization.

This is the first step toward defining the right configuration and pricing for you.

Norma is a turnkey cloud-based platform that requires no special infrastructure on the client side. Norma can be integrated into any web environment, regardless of the technologies in use.

Absolutely. Norma is available online anywhere in the world, with no geographical limitations.

The platform supports multiple languages, allowing each account to adapt its interface and content languages to organizational needs.

Norma’s implementation follows five key steps:

1. Needs assessment
2. Client account setup
3. Data migration
4. Training
5. Launch and ongoing support

Lexum supports you at every step with a turnkey approach, covering all your legal information management and publishing needs.

Yes. Lexum provides specialized services, including:

• Document template creation.
• Optical character recognition (OCR) from images.
• Complex document typesetting.

These can be provided on-demand or continuously.

Our legal technicians can also manage and publish your documents—simply send them to us in bulk or as they become available, and we’ll handle processing and publication.

The average implementation time is 2 to 4 months, depending on the volume of documents to migrate and the structure of their metadata.

Yes. All Lexum clients benefit from a responsive support service, available by email or phone. Our experts are available Monday to Friday, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (EST), excluding public holidays.

Clients also have access to comprehensive documentation and online training resources.

Yes. Lexum releases new versions of Norma several times a year. These updates include both enhancements and new features. All our clients benefit from them automatically.

All data is securely hosted, following industry best practices for protection and confidentiality:

• SSL/TLS encryption.
• Redundant servers to ensure availability.
• Regular backups.
• Compliance with applicable privacy laws.

Lexum is also engaged in a SOC 2 certification process, ensuring high standards of security and reliability.

Lexum’s environment is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. We operate servers in Canada, the United States, and soon in Europe.

Your data can be hosted in the region of your choice, with no international duplication.

Lexum’s solutions are completely turnkey: your IT team doesn’t have to do any development, or any maintenance. This means your staff can focus on other projects that require more attention. We release four updates per year, ensuring that your platform is always up to date without any additional internal workload.

Publishing on an open access portal promotes public access, which we support. Many organizations use Lexum’s technology as a complement to:

• Have an official, structured, and controlled source collection,
• Offer a personalized user experience,
• Access detailed viewing statistics.

Norma accounts include three permission levels:

• Administrator : Configuration and user access management.
• Editor : Content creation and management.
• Member : Document browsing and research. Access between members can be segmented into groups with varying permissions.

Yes. Norma supports SSO and integrates easily with major institutional identity providers, whether they use SAML 2.0, OAuth2, OpenID Connect, or other standard protocols.

This gives you centralized access management and a simplified login experience.

Yes. Norma’s interface complies with WCAG principles to ensure optimal accessibility for people with visual, motor, or cognitive limitations.

This includes:

• Sufficient contrast between graphic elements,
• Smooth keyboard navigation,
• Alternative text for non-text elements,
• Components compatible with screen readers.

Yes. Norma includes a comprehensive audit trail, allowing you to track all important actions recorded in the system: publications, modifications, deletions, permission changes, logins, etc.

Audit logs ensure transparency, support compliance, and facilitate internal investigations by clearly indicating who did what, and when.

When a new version of a document is published with Norma, user notes are automatically associated with the corresponding paragraphs in the new version. When a paragraph has been deleted, the associated notes become floating notes: they remain visible without being associated with a specific portion of the new document.

Yes. You can:

• Subscribe to Norma’s mailing list to be notified of all new publications, or
• If the account is equipped with myNorma, create personalized alerts by keyword, theme, or specific document.

By default, Norma’s search results are sorted by relevance. They can also be sorted by date.

Solex, Lexum’s search engine integrated into Norma, evaluates dozens of variables, including the frequency and position of terms, the context in which they appear (for example, terms identified in a title carry more weight than those in the middle of a paragraph), and the popularity of the document within the entire collection. This analysis allows the most relevant results to be displayed at the top of the list.