To have a country governed by the rule of law and not the rule of man requires that the law be known. As few communication networks are as efficient for disseminating information as social media networks, it should not be that surprising that Twitter, Facebook and other networks can very effectively serve that objective.

Twitter and Facebook will not and should not supplant the role of government and the courts to make the law known, but even the law makers themselves can and are making increasing use of social media to augment their efforts.

#TellVicEverything

Before adopting too pious a tone in this column, I should note that I love a good Twitter meme as much as the next person and I too use Twitter for frivolous and self-aggrandizing purposes. My point is merely that Twitter as a platform enables so much more. David Bilinsky wrote on Slaw about the Nova Scotia courts and their use of Twitter to broadcast the availability of new decisions and of other important details pertaining to the activities of those courts. Over at the Supreme Court of Canada, while not itself tweeting, we can easily see that every one of its rulings are now tweeted by someone. Not just links, but editorial comment as well, delivered in 100 character snippets by many prominent twittering others. In fact, constitutional scholars and leading Canadian appellate advocates regularly delve into extended twitter debates about the meaning of any given ruling.

Look, for example, at the 21 French and 39 English language tweets linking to the SCC.lexum.org presentation of S.L. v. Commission scolaire des Chênes. Or the 90 tweeted links to the English language version of Reference re Securities Act. Bear in mind also that CanLII’s presentation of these decisions will drive additional tweeted links. And the twitter conversation around the issues will be comprised of still hundreds more tweets that either eschew links or offer links to media or other analysis of the issues raised by the case or legislative source.

These activities are fully consistent with the sentiment behind the preamble to the Reproduction of Federal Law Order which provides as follows:

Whereas it is of fundamental importance to a democratic society that its law be widely known and that its citizens have unimpeded access to that law

To reinforce the rule of law and for the law to be widely known it must be openly and frequently brought into public view and made part of public discourse. It will be a long time before we see Donoghue v Stevenson “trending” on Twitter, or receiving tens of thousands of “likes” on Facebook. But sudden changes or dramatic turns in legal understanding brought about by a court judgment will and frequently do attract significant attention in both venues. And it is this attention, whether triggered by a court’s own twitter account or the accounts of court observers that enhance awareness of the changes and facilitate the process for understanding “new” law.

When you learn from Twitter, don’t forget to cite the source

As mentioned, we see examples of this with every new Supreme Court decisions, but one of the most dramatic examples in recent months came out of the Ontario Court of Appeal with the release of Jones v. Tsige and the introduction into the legal canon and popular vernacular of the “tort of intrusion upon seclusion”. True understanding of the implications of this ruling will take analysis and further judicial consideration by subsequent courts faced with new actions, but a significant amount of discussion was triggered through Twitter alone within hours of the decision hitting the Ontario Courts website.

The twitter-tracking site Topsy.com shows 81 separate tweets with links to the Ontario Courts presentation of the decision.

Among those doing the tweeting were leading technology and privacy law academics and practitioners, alongside dozens of twittering lawyers, media and more, all with a collective “follower” reach of over one hundred thousand individuals (not quite @AplusK numbers, but still not too shabby in a Canadian legal context). These tweets spawned, countless blogs which themselves included links back to the cases. All in all, Twitter likely had a significant hand in facilitating public awareness and understanding of an important development in the law.

If a tweet falls in the forest…

The foregoing examples might begin to convince you that Twitter is a useful broadcast medium for court decisions, but to begin to buy-in to the idea of Twitter have a role in fortifying the rule of law, there should be evidence that people are in fact following the links.

So are people clicking through? I can’t comment on the Twitter click-throughs experienced by the Ontario Courts or the SCC in the examples mentioned above, but I can talk about CanLII’s experience.

It starts in 2008. We think we have managed to identify Tweet-zero: the first time a tweet linking to CanLII content resulted in someone reaching the site. If we are correct, tweet-zero occurred in May 2008 and was courtesy of a long-time Slaw contributor.

In 2008, twenty-seven CanLII page views are attributable to links contained in Tweets. In 2009, that number was 911. It grew to 2591 and then 9206 in 2010 and 2011, respectively. Forecasting 2012 results on the number and growth in page views over the first three months of the year, it’s reasonable to predict that totals will top 25,000.

Click on image to enlarge.

Add to CanLII’s 25K+ page views the thousands (tens of thousands?) more that will be experienced by Canadian court websites and it becomes increasingly evident that Twitter has the potential to be a potent medium for raising awareness and promoting understanding of Canadian law.

And Facebook? Well, CanLII’s internal statistics indicate that over twice as many page views originate from Facebook as from Twitter links, but as this example shows, the circumstances that attract attention on that network may tend more to the peculiar or salacious than the comparatively erudite debate found on Twitter. [Again, mea culpa. I like reading and talking about peculiar decisions] So while its influence can’t be denied, the case for its contribution to the rule of law may be a little harder to make at this time.

I am lawyer, hear me tweet

Tweeting is easy because even in the absence of a “Tweet” button, web-based content can be pushed to Twitter with a simple cut-and-paste of the URL, so the only function of Tweet buttons on sites like Slaw or even CanLII is to make that process even easier. Content is pushed, in the form of links, to where the conversation takes place, and links serve the function of bringing the individual, not the conversation, back to the content.

And finally, because a tweeted link to primary law is only valuable if read, one might ask what methods are likely to encourage that action? I hesitate to offer a list of “best practices” but I will offer examples of tweets I find compelling.

• Slaw’s own trailblazing CanCourts twitter feeds, naturally!
• The “Wow! This is neat” tweet.
• The “#CDNPOLI” tweet.
• The “this is new, have you seen this?” tweet.
• The “I think this is what you are looking for” tweet.
• The “allow me to correct your misunderstanding” tweet.
• And the most popular and (in my view) most effective, the “100 character headnote” tweet:
• Example 1
• Example 2
•  Example 3

@CanLII

Where does CanLII fit in all of this? Naturally CanLII encourages it. In fact, in September of last year, we added Tweet buttons to all our decisions. Yes, we do benefit from the increased traffic and awareness of our service that comes from the tweeting, but our decision to include the buttons was more a reaction to behaviours that we already observing rather than an attempt to engineer a paradigm for expanding juridical awareness. We are happy to facilitate the activity but we do so only as a small part of a much bigger trend and a much bigger purpose.

At publication of this column @CanLII will have just marked its one year twitterversary and hopefully welcomed its 2000^th follower.

So…do you tweet law links or follow those who do?

The rule of law requires that laws be widely known.

Few would dispute that Twitter can be quite useful at making things widely known.

I have been preoccupied with this idea for a little while now. Last month I wrote a piece on it for publication on Slaw (watch for it on 16 April 2012). The explosion of Twitter activity surrounding the Ontario Court of Appeal release today in Canada (Attorney General) v. Bedford, 2012 ONCA 186 confirms my belief that Twitter provides an excellent outlet for lawyers, other legal professionals and the public itself to augment the work of Courts and governments to ensure the law is widely known.

While the nature of this case and the mass media coverage would have ensured widespread public awareness of Bedford in a world without Twitter, surely the 100+ tweets with links to the full text of the decision appearing within one hour the public release of the ruling provides important insights into the power of the tool as a means of spreading news of legal developments on a timely basis.

Rather than make the full case in support of my view now, I will seek your indulgence to hold off until the column appears on the left hand side of the page in a few weeks. In the meantime, I hope that a glance at this graphic (time stamp: Noon EST, 26 March 2012) and the continuously updated version of the same chart available through Topsy.com at the attached link will open your mind to the idea that Twitter can play a significant role in spreading awareness and promoting discussion of the law.

The OntarioCourts.ca spike relates to today’s decision. The SCC.lexum.org spikes correspond to Supreme Court of Canada releases. And the CanLII spikes relate to noteworthy decisions from a variety of courts. In all cases, the momentum comes from Twitter users linking to the decisions and not from promotional attempts of the Courts.

Click on image to enlarge.

[Note: All CanLII decisions are equally accessible via both CanLII.org (default) and CanLII.ca (used in conjunction with short URL) domains. The blue line for CanLII catches both as well as the occasional Twitter mention without a link.]

Lacking The Right Stuff, Sylvio Langevin finds his Galaxy Quest over just as he launched his Mission to Mars. With the prospect of A New Hope subject to leave of the Men (and women) in Black, perhaps he should seek Serenity, abandon his quest and make The Voyage Home.

In a Langevin (Re), a decision released last week but published on CanLII just yesterday, the Quebec Superior Court declared Langevin a “quarrelsome litigant” and barred him from bringing any further action without leave.

That order alone, though infrequently issued and a factually and legally interesting part of the judgment, was not the reason the decision became – in a matter of hours – the most consulted case on CanLII for 2012. No, the reason for the instant notoriety was the pleadings filed by Langevin that prompted the Court's action.

In a nutshell, Langevin claimed ownership of Earth.

And Mercury, Venus, Jupiter (and its four largest moons), Saturn and Uranus as well.

Recognizing a gap in his request, he sought at the hearing, to amend his pleading to include a claim for Neptune, Pluto and all the space in between each planet across the galaxy.

Finally, he invited the Court to take the opportunity to overturn a 19 December 2011 ruling wherein his prior claims of ownership over Mars and the moon were found to lack legal basis and summarily rejected.

Despite being unopposed (Langevin submitted that the only suitable respondent, God, being incorporeal, was not “invitable” as a respondent), the Court denied the appeal and dismissed all the new claims.

Finally, as these were but the latest in a long line of “vexatious or quarrelsome” applications (to borrow from the language of Quebec's Code of Civil Procedure), the Court found no difficulty in barring Langevin from instituting further proceedings.

For me to continue to summarize the case would not do it justice so I invite others to share their impressions and analysis in the comments section below.

Captivating content aside, how did word of the case spread?

Langevin (Re) had been racking up page views on CanLII all day. One thousand by 2:00 p.m., nearly three thousand by 4:00 p.m. It ended the day with a remarkable 9,007 page views! In 2011, that would have been sufficient to make it the 4^th most consulted case of the year.

Last night after dinner, I turned to the task of preparing this article, convinced that in addition to discussing the highlights of M. Langevin's efforts to secure dominion over our solar system, I would also cast a light on the role Twitter played in spreading awareness of the decision. Earlier in the week, I was able to trace nearly one third of Richard v. Time Inc. 2012 SCC 8 (CanLII) page views to twitter links, so surely it had to be a factor here.

Making use of online toys Revisit and Screencast-o-matic, I created this 2 minute video demonstrating how 6 hours worth of tweets (27), retweets (12) and mentions (9) containing links to the decision contributed to the public's enormous interest. [Note: 10 seconds of the video gives you the idea]

But when I looked at CanLII's internal referrer site and page view stats, the facts didn't bear out the theory. Despite attaining “tweet” levels between 1:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. generally only seen for the hottest Supreme Court of Canada decisions, actual page views of the decision were several orders of magnitudes higher than growth in referrals from twitter would suggest.

Then I remembered Hubert David's piece in Slaw from couple months ago discussing Educaloi's social media experience. Hubert pointed out that Twitter usage in Quebec is well below national levels and that Facebook reigns supreme. Sure enough, that was the key.

In all of January 2012, there were 2,851 CanLII page views attributable to Facebook page referrals. Between 7:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. last night, 2,201 CanLII page views were derived from people clicking links from within Facebook. Over that same time period total views of Langevin increased by 2,691. Coincidence?

Unlikely. Facebook was a major, if not the single most important factor in spreading awareness of the decision.

Lessons learned

So in the final analysis Langevin (Re) taught us the following:

1. You can't claim ownership of the solar system.
2. At the very least, should you attempt to do so, try a common law jurisdiction where you might be able to base your case on equity. Alberta, perhaps? Try the Judicature Act, ss. 8 or 15.
3. If you poke a Court enough times, they will poke back.
4. Social media in general and Facebook in particular can play a significant role in spreading legal information and awareness.

[Shameless plug: follow us on twitter @CanLII, Like us on Facebook.com/CanLII.org]

For many members of the general public seeking to understand the law, Wikipedia is the first and perhaps only stop. Others may go further and eventually come across equally accessible but considerably more reliable sources – online or otherwise. In any event, there is often a gulf between where the general public goes to understand the law and where the understanding is available.

Based on observations of a little experiment in contextual-linking, small efforts can go a long way toward bridging that gulf.

Contextual-linking is different from promotional or advisory linking such as is found on the "links" page of so many websites. I'm using the term here to describe links that pertain directly to the subject matter of the text in which the link appears. As I describe below, small efforts in building contextual links can redirect an engaged and curious person to valuable material.

There is no discovery or originality in my observation. In fact, I'm pretty sure Google and others are on to the idea. Innovation, if any, would come in the application of the concept to public legal education and, hopefully, in the scale of that effort.

A wee Wikipedia experiment

On December 23^rd, I went to the Wikipedia article for the Criminal Code of Canada and in the "structure" section of the page where a prior editor had helpfully listed title of each of the 34 major parts of the Code, I embedded a hyperlink pointing back to the appearance of that part in CanLII's version of the Code.

It took about 15 minutes and had an astonishing impact.

December page view referrals from that article to CanLII were the highest of any month in 2011 of any of the over 2000 Wikipedia articles referring web traffic to CanLII. Relative to the Criminal Code article itself, December CanLII page view referrals:

• were three times greater than the prior most active month;
• equalled 45% of the Jan-November 2011 total; and
• represented over 1/3 of the 2011 total.

The momentum continued in 2012. Barely six days into the new year, total page view referrals from the Wikipedia Criminal Code article exceeded the December total and now demonstrate a daily pace that just prior to the experiment came only monthly.

In an attempt to confirm that the results were attributable to my experiment and not some external event, I examined overall referrals stats for other popular and related Wikipedia articles and saw no similar spikes or other evidence of general increases. To the contrary, as the Wikipedia site stats for article in fact showed lower than average visits since the time of my edits, including no visits at all on December 24^th and 25^th.

As a further step to confirm the impact of adding the links, late in the afternoon on January 2^nd, I added the same sort of links to a different article (this time it only took 3 minutes) and observed an immediate six-fold increase in daily page views and attainment of the 2011 monthly average within 4 days.

Because CanLII is first and foremost a research tool, page views are primarily generated by users already on the site as they carry out their research and growth is therefore dependent on user satisfaction with the resource. Page views generated by referring links represent a tiny percentage of the total (typically in the 2% range) although the actual number of external referring sources is fairly large.

82 637 different external web pages sent traffic to CanLII in 2011 resulting in nearly 1.7M page views. Linked traffic from Wikipedia articles accounted for approximately 50 000 (or approximately 3%) of those page views. So while sizeable, increased traffic from Wikipedia will not move the needle much relative to CanLII's total page views (~80M in 2011), but I do hope people who discover CanLII as a result of a Wikipedia link will find some benefit.

Building bridges to understanding link-by-link

I will never know if the 18 minutes I spent adding legislative hyperlinks to existing Wikipedia text made any difference to the people who clicked on them. The statutes are no less impenetrable; the justice system is no less imposing. But I take some satisfaction in knowing that the engaged and curious people who clicked those links have accessed reliable information and may be one step closer to understanding the law. More to the point, I am now fascinated by the possibility of taking this idea further and enhancing Wikipedia text with links to not just primary law, but to secondary and explanatory sources where actual understanding is delivered through useful and accurate information.

Lawyers, assiduous linkers and charmingly pedantic* in their desire to validate their every utterance by reference to supporting authority for every point made, are natural bridge builders in this context. Imagine the net benefit to those who will continue to make Wikipedia their first stop in knowing the law if there were hundreds more bridges available that could lead people out of the morass? Imagine how easy it would be to do this if hundreds of legal professionals made a one-time, 15 minute effort to improve a Wikipedia law-related article by adding a contextual link to a reliable and freely accessible legal information resource?

If you take up the challenge, be sure to take a glance at Wikipedia's style guide and its rules for incorporating external links lest a transgression come to the attention of a zealous Wikipedian who comes in and erases your footprints after you leave. [I approached this in reverse and only learned of the rules after making edits. As it happens, my edits are possibly offside the rules but have yet to be undone].

Looking for a redirection target? 

In addition to legislative and case links, how about linking to a relevant article found on a government or PLEI (public legal education and information) website? [See my November column for a discussion of the PLEIs.] For general legal terminology and understanding and you might consider an article from the irreverent but thorough Duhaime.org. For criminal law you might consider an article from the site maintained by B.C. crown counsel Henry Waldock (though targeted to police officers as a primary audience, the text is written in plain language and very easy to follow). Maybe you know of other in-depth legal issues websites maintained by lawyers, professors or others?

Why should we care?

Though it probably doesn't need to be said, I will say it anyway. As governments and the PLEIs well understand, access to legal information and understanding is a critical piece in the broader societal goal of ensuring citizen access to justice. This goal should be shared by all legal professionals.

There is no denying Wikipedia's drawing power. If readers of this article set aside 15 minutes to add to a Wikipedia article a few of the missing links could bring its legally-inclined visitors closer to their objective of understanding the subject of their search, we could make a small advance toward our shared goal of ensuring access to justice.

Choose any article you like or drop me a line if you want suggestions from among the 2 237 Wikipedia articles already driving clicks from people trying to learn more about the law.

______________________

*As just such a pedantic lawyer, I humbly present my new favourite joke (sourced from too many places to mention): " A pedant walks into a bar. Well, it's a restaurant with a bar. Technically it's a brewpub since it has an onsite microbrewery …"

Subjective top ten lists are great for starting arguments given the improbability of any two people sharing precisely the same worldview. It's a little tougher to engender heated debate over objectively measured top ten lists, but not impossible. After all, we can still dispute methodology and relevance! I invite Slaw readers to infer meaning and to offer analysis of the results.

So with that, I'm pleased to present for 2011 the top 10 most consulted cases on CanLII.

1. Bruni v. Bruni, 2010 ONSC 6568
2. Indalex Limited (Re), 2011 ONCA 265
3. Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick, 2008 SCC 9
4. Bedford v. Canada, 2010 ONSC 4264
5. R. v. Grant, 2009 SCC 32
6. Kerr v. Baranow, 2011 SCC 10
7. R. v. Oakes, 1986 CanLII 46 (SCC), [1986] 1 SCR 103
8. R. v. Stinchcombe, 1991 CanLII 45 (SCC), [1991] 3 SCR 326
9. Baker v. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration), 1999 CanLII 699 (SCC), [1999] 2 SCR 817
10. Reference re Secession of Quebec, 1998 CanLII 793 (SCC), [1998] 2 SCR 217

Bruni rated 18,641 views and the Secession Reference came in at 5,105.

To get a sense of scale, compare these numbers with the 1000^th most consulted case – which still attracted nearly 500 views.

Graphically, the results of the top 1000 most consulted cases present as a "long tail" (or for the mathematically inclined, as an asymptote).

(Click on image to enlarge)

Among cases actually decided in 2011, the top 10 looks like this:

1. Indalex Limited (Re), 2011 ONCA 265
2. Kerr v. Baranow, 2011 SCC 10
3. JM (Re), 2011 CanLII 7955 (ON CCB)
4. Century 21 Canada Limited Partnership v. Rogers Communications Inc., 2011 BCSC 1196
5. United Food and Commercial Workers' International Union, Local 1518 v. British Columbia (Labour Relations Board), 2011 BCSC 455
6. Voltage Pictures LLC c. Untel, 2011 CF 1024
7. Ontario (Attorney General) v. Fraser, 2011 SCC 20
8. R. v. J.A., 2011 SCC 28
9. Ontario Korean Businessmen's Assoc. v. Seung Jin Oh, 2011 ONSC 6991
10. Withler v. Canada (Attorney General), 2011 SCC 12

Indalex amassed a remarkable 17,433 views and Withler a respectable 2,825.

The graphical representation of the top 1000 among cases decided in 2011 is indistinguishable from the above chart (save for the Bruni peak). The honour of 1000^th most consulted case falls to Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation v. Alberta (Minister of Energy), 2011 ABCA 29 with 341 views.

Background and miscellanea: 

• CanLII's operations have been continuously funded by Canada's provincial and territorial law societies (and by extension, Canada's lawyers and notaries) since 2000 to allow legal professionals and the public to access primary legal information at no direct cost.
• CanLII's database contains over 1 million documents and is on track to a record year of receiving nearly 7 million visits and delivering over 80 million page views
• While most documents on CanLII are decisions of courts and tribunals, page views of legislation and regulation outstrip page views of cases by a sizeable margin. For example, monthly Criminal Code page views exceed 20,000 and monthly views of the Code civil du Québec exceed 15,000.
• CanLII is widely used by the legal profession (over 95% of lawyers responding to our fall mini-survey reported at least weekly use), but as a freely available tool its non-lawyer users are legion. Monthly unique visitors are routinely over 200,000. Consequently, the results might be considered a barometer of public interest, as well and possibly more so, than as one of legal significance.
• A "view" or "consultation" of a document is measured as the interaction of an individual with the case URL. Mere appearance of a case in a list of search results will not constitute a view, but opening it to inspect it will. Similarly, where a user subscribes to RSS feeds and a case appears in the list, the case view does not take place until it is opened.
• Results above aggregate views for a given decision across formats (PDF or HTML) and across French and English.
• No French language case cracked the overall top 10, but one, Voltage, ranked among decisions issued in 2011. Originally issued in French, and subsequently released in English as well, French language views alone would have placed this case at number 7
• Standings measured as of December 20^th. If it turns out that thousands of Canadians spend the holidays reviewing the December 22^nd SCC decision on the Securities Reference, I will gladly update the list accordingly so that historians might have an accurate record of the case law that most concerned Canadians in 2011.

Back in the 80’s – well before the availability of such innovative distractions and time wasters as the internet, Netflix, DisneyXD or PVRs – the late afternoon viewing options for pre-teen couch-potatoes were pretty sparse. Worse still, most of what was available often tried to impart important life lessons to impressionable young minds. Anyone remember the ABC After School Specials?

Some of those lessons must have stuck, because I can no longer hear someone say “now I know” (or some such) without reflexively adding the GI Joe inspired response: “and knowing is half the battle!”

So it goes with access to justice and attempts to understand the law in times of need. Several Slaw contributors and countless others elsewhere regularly grapple with how to identify, define and address a variety of access gaps the overcoming of which would presumably meet our common goal of improving access to justice. For today, I am going to focus on the “knowing the law” gap – after all, solving that is half the battle, or so I’m told.

Without the benefit of a serendipitous encounter with a friendly GI Joe team member* whenever I, my neighbour, a recent immigrant or anyone else for the matter needs an appreciation of legal rights, how can one come to know the law? With over 1.6 billion results to a Google search of the word “law”, it’s not as if we lack for sources to explore. In many cases, even knowing our legal rights may be of little consequence if we lack the resource, opportunity of ability to use that knowledge to bring about a just result.

That said, no matter what barriers remain in the overall pursuit of improving access to justice, we must continue to do all we can to ensure knowledge of the law is accessible to those who seek it out. In this regard, I have always had a particular admiration for the PLEIs – a.k.a the providers of Public Legal Education and Information.

The continuum of public legal education and information providers is wide and I strongly encourage readers to provide in the comments links to the many dozens of resources I will fail to mention here. What most if not all of the providers along the continuum have in common is the mandate to provide information to the public in the time, place and form that meets their needs. This holds whether we are talking about Clicklaw in B.C. or Community Legal Information Association in P.E.I. Organizations such as these are on the front lines of the access to justice cause. In the Susskind view of legal services, one might say they are building the fence at the top of the hill while leaving the task of managing the ambulance at the bottom to others.

They are not new, but there is a growing urgency to their function, in particular their ability to promote self-help from people before or instead of relying on more expensive parts of the legal system. Lawyers would do well to take note and to find ways to promote and support these initiatives. Many do already. But even among lawyers with an awareness of the presence and mission of the PLEIs, a dismissive attitude about the benefit of public legal education as a means of improving access to justice can surface. You probably wouldn’t have much difficulty thinking of a colleague who shares this wag’s opinion, spoken in response to presentations on British public legal education initiatives:

"I'm not sure telling schoolchildren what their legal rights are will solve the legal aid funding crisis," said one senior figure of a well-known pro bono charity.
(Legal profession braces itself for a surge in DIY lawyers after funding cuts, Guardian UK print and online posted Nov 08, 2011)

The attitude misses the point of the PLEI initiatives. Public legal education can no more solve the legal aid funding crisis than can solving the legal aid funding crisis lower the costs of access to justice for the middle class. No one solution and no one agency can address the range of legal issues and challenges a person can face in time of need. All are necessary. More importantly, the value of each potential solution can be enhanced if access to all elements the overall system of the administration of justice are brought within closer reach of more people.

It is evident by the volume and quality of contributions and comments that Slaw readers and contributors are also strong proponents of raising the level of understanding and quality of engagement of those around them. As speakers, authors, educators and lawyers, they give their time and talents in ways big and small, public and private. If I could impose one more task on them, it would be to use their prominence within the legal community to draw more support and attention among their fellow professionals to the work the PLEIs.

Why focus on fellow professionals if the broader goal is access to justice for all Canadians? Because the PLEIs themselves are particularly adept at getting their message out to the public, although they would benefit greatly from the institutional support the legal community could bring to enhancing and promoting their efforts. This idea of lending legal support to the organizations best suited to support the public finds favour in a newly released UK report on access to justice for lay litigants. See, for example, paragraph 58 of the report:

Justice is secured through a system, with the courts (and tribunals) at the apex, and effective public legal education and access to advice and assistance at the base. Lawyers play a key part in that system. In any particular situation access to lawyers may be key to meaningful access to justice and the courts. In other situations access to justice may be achieved without needing to reach the courts, and access to lawyers may or may not have been key to that achievement.

Get more lawyers and legal institutions recognizing the value the PLEIs bring and hopefully what follows is greater support of their work from their funders and new links between their work and that of others in the network of legal information and service providers.

The PLEIs know how to distil and present complex legal issues in simple and accessible language and they have also been among the pioneers in adapting to social media and internet-based communication tools. Spend a little time on Educaloi, YourLegalRights, one of the LawCentral sites or some of the others and you will see sterling examples of straightforward guidance, often delivered in creative but always accessible ways. The PLEIs have also been very good at raising the bar nationally, with regional events in Montreal (Colloque D’Educaloi – October 2010) and Vancouver (Justaclickaway – February 2011) culminating in fascinating collections of insights and best practices in the delivery of public legal education and the use of new media tools to do it. Check out the Just a Click Away Conference report released in September 2011 – you won’t be disappointed, and I daresay you will be energized by the potential.

Let me return to where I began – knowing is half the battle. Different groups are doing different things to improve access to justice in this country. This is a multi-faceted and big enough challenge that I am supportive of all efforts and don’t consider it one of those situations where people should stop doing “A” in favour of “B”. However, I do consider the benefit of supporting and promoting the PLEIs to represent one of the greater opportunities to engender a very positive difference in return for the investment.

How many thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours does the legal system save every time someone visits one of these trusted sources and reads an authoritative article on what to do if you are evicted? Or on how to cancel an order placed online? Or on the nature of their rights as an employee?

The knowledge gained might be sufficient to give a person control of her own issues, and at minimum represents an important first step in acquiring the knowledge to know when dig further or when to move forward with professional help. But no matter what, the knowledge imparted unquestionably has the potential to reduce the strain elsewhere in the system thereby improving the odds that other efforts in support of access to justice will meet with greater success.

There. Now you know.

___________________________________

*If you happened to meet a random Joe team member, you would be best served if that member was Scarlett, who, in addition to being pretty handy with a cross-bow, also happens to be a lawyer.