Legal Research for the Public Researcher
Get a brief overview of the legal research process.
This brief guide is for members of the public who are conducting their own legal research. Our library staff cannot provide legal advice or assist with filling out legal forms.
Before you start researching
If you have not already consulted a licensed legal professional, consider these options:
- If your employer offers an employee assistance program, you may be eligible for a free consultation with a lawyer or a referral to discounted legal services.
- Contact the Law Society Referral Service for a free consultation with a lawyer or paralegal
- Contact a Legal Clinic near you.
Doing legal research is a specialized skill, so print and online handbooks exist to help anyone learn how to research the law efficiently. Before you begin your research, consult a couple of these handbooks to better understand the research process.
Our library has a guide listing our top legal research texts in print. The Canadian Legal Research and Writing Guide on CanLII is also a helpful free online resource.
Planning your research and recording your work is important for any legal researcher. Spending time to stay organized will help you do research efficiently.
The Canadian Legal Research and Writing Guide on CanLII has a sample checklist in section 2.9. The checklist outlines the information sources that you may consult for your research. Keeping track of what you already consulted in a research log will help you remember your work later. After consulting a source, consider recording:
- Source name or Publication details (title, author, publishing year, website name)
- Date you reviewed it
- Important page numbers or URLs
- Keywords used for searching
- Any comments you had about the source
To learn more about organizing your research, consult section 2.4 of The Canadian Legal Research and Writing Guide on CanLII.
Doing legal research
Reputable open-access resources, like CanLII, are helpful sources of legal information. However, not everything is available online since some legal information is only available in print. You may need to use both print and online sources for your research.
Locating secondary sources (commentary) is the first step in legal research. Secondary sources are books and other sources which help explain and locate the law. Written by legal experts, secondary sources provide an overview of the law and point to relevant primary sources of law, like cases, statutes, and regulations.
Secondary sources include legal encyclopedias, textbooks or treatises, journal articles, legal dictionaries, government reports, legal education materials and seminar papers. Get an understanding of your topic by starting with a legal encyclopedia or textbook, and then move onto journal articles.
Consult our research guides to find secondary sources for your topic. Learn more about commentary in Chapter 3 of The Canadian Legal Research and Writing Guide.
Primary sources include cases (sometimes called decisions, judgments, or jurisprudence) and legislation (like statutes and regulations). To save time, start with secondary sources so you can identify which legislation and cases are relevant to your problem.
You can find most current and some previous versions of Canadian legislation online through government websites.
Many important and recent Canadian cases are freely accessible online on CanLII. Other considerations:
- More than one statute or regulation may apply to your problem
- Federal and provincial statutes may address the same area of law (e.g., health law); use secondary sources to identify them
- Statutes are continually revised; check back to make sure information is current
- Cases can affect the interpretation of statutes
After locating cases and legislation, you must determine if they are still “good law”, a process known as “Noting Up”. Learn about the importance of noting up in Chapters 11.1-11.2 of The Canadian Legal Research and Writing Guide.
Our library does not keep or retrieve court documents associated with specific cases. To obtain court documents from a case, you must contact the courthouse where the case was heard.
Some courts like the Supreme Court of Canada publish some court documents on their website. Some courts have guides on accessing court documents. For example, see the Government of Ontario’s guide to Access court files, documents and exhibits. For additional guidance, see Secret Canada's guide "How to access Canadian Court records by jurisdiction".
If possible, try to gather key details about the case before contacting the courthouse:
- Party names (name of plaintiffs and defendants, accused)
- Names of the judge
- Name and location of the court
- Any hearing dates and decision dates
- File number or docket information
Filling out legal forms & court documents
Our library staff cannot help you with drafting court documents or filling out forms. Guided Pathways on CLEO’s Steps to Justice site can help you fill out common court forms and documents in Ontario. This online tool asks you questions and then uses your answers to fill in the forms and letters you need. When you are done, you can save and print your papers.
If you need assistance to fill out legal forms, you will need to contact a lawyer, paralegal, or a legal clinic.