3… 2… 1… (Re)Launch Your Saskatchewan Legal Databases!

November 20, 2020

By Alan Kilpatrick, Librarian

I am very excited to announce that today we are officially relaunching our searchable in-house Saskatchewan legal databases on a modern, mobile-friendly, cloud-based platform:

• Law Society of Saskatchewan Conduct Review Database
• Law Society of Saskatchewan Ethics Rulings Database
• Saskatchewan Bills database
• Saskatchewan Cases database
• Saskatchewan Court of Appeal Sentencing Digest

Saskatchewan legal practitioners, the judiciary, and members of the public can rely on the free, timely, and reliable access to legal information these databases provide.

Forty Years of Legal & Technical Innovation 

Developed by your pioneering Law Society Library staff through the 1980s and 1990s, these databases represent Saskatchewan’s very first instances of legal and technical innovation.  Our law library staff saw that Saskatchewan, as a small province, was not being well served by Canada’s commercial legal publishers and that there was a significant delay before our case law became available in commercial sources.

What did they do?

They boldly decided to go ahead and solve the problem themselves by stepping into the role of legal content creator, publisher, and database developer, creating databases to ensure Saskatchewan practitioners and residents could find, access, and use the law they needed.  Through their forward-thinking innovation, they created the first online internet case law database created by a law society in Canada.  Legal innovation is not new.  Law libraries have been doing it for decades.

Why Did We Relaunch the Databases? 

Over the past year, your Law Society Legal Resources team has led a major project to migrate these databases and their corresponding datasets to the new platform.

Our existing platform was out of date and we felt it was the right time to migrate our data.  We remain firmly committed to providing legal information resources in the latest formats available.  Legal information enhancements are not static.  They are constantly evolving.  We are constantly upgrading and advancing the resources practitioners and the public have access to.

These databases remain incredibly popular throughout the province, with Saskatchewan Cases receiving over 4000 hits a month alone.  Why are they so popular? They are extremely powerful tools.  Consider adding them to your practice and legal information toolkit.

Finally, the over forty years’ worth of structured data and content contained within these databases represents a valuable commodity for the Law Society, its members, and the citizenry of this province.

Need a Free CPD Credit Before the End of the Year?

Don’t miss (Re)Launching Your Saskatchewan Legal Databases.  Our free webinar, open to members, non-members, and the public, qualifies for 1 free CPD Hour and is being held on Tuesday, November 24th from 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM CST. Throughout this webinar, we’ll introduce you to the “relaunched” Saskatchewan legal databases and offer a variety of tips and tricks to enable you to maximize their potential.  Register here!

My special thanks to Christine Muldoon, Paul Westgate, Ken Fox, and Melanie Hodges Neufeld and the rest of the Legal Resources crew for all the hard work they put into this project over the past year.