I would like to add the following points to the discussion:

- Acronyms corresponding to names of case law reports or other legal publications seem easy to reform than other abbreviations since they have a clear meaning in the legal context. When you see "37 DLR (4th) 148", you know what DLR means, you don't miss the periods. You also know what "QL" means. These are low hanging fruits. More problematic are the periods denoting initials of de-identified persons in case names.

- Justice Canada has published its regulations with the "SOR" or "SI" acronyms since many years. Other jusrisdictions omit periods or even spaces in their citations (e.g. "RSA 2000 cD‑2"). Legal guides still recommend the insertion of periods in these acronyms. As authors should we use the standard set by the original source – which is sometimes the official one – , or should we follow the editorial standards? I agree that it is crucial that those who set these editorial standards make some progress on the issue.

- As legal researchers, we are also facing a problem with electronic search. You still find search engines that will require the insertion of dots or other meaningless punctuation to work properly. This is technically easy to resolve; search engines can be made "punctuation insensitive" by default. You should be able to retrieve the same documents from a system by either typing "L.R.C. 1985, c. 1 (5th Supp.)" or "LRC 1985 c 1 (5th Supp)".

Of course as you point out, the main problem is not really where we want to go, but how would this be implemented. It would be interesting to see how this change has been achieved in the U.K. and in Australia, which have both abandoned the "Full stop".

I suspect that all this must make the code for legal databases much easier.

Periods used in abbreviations aren't full stops, are they?

(I say nothing, of course, about exclamation marks… )