The Next Wave of Canadian Legal AI Began in 1965

Take a moment to thank Eric Appleby, founder of Maritime Law Book, because the Canadian legal AI future announced today by Clio is only possible because Eric was sufficiently frustrated by the lack of access to New Brunswick case law in the 1960s that he decided to start a legal publishing company. No Eric, no MLB. No MLB, no Canadian case law in Clio and no next wave of Canadian legal AI.

You know the saying attributed to Nelson Mandela that begins “the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago?” Well, the tree now bearing fruit is one that Eric planted over 60 years ago.

Eric Appleby founded Maritime Law Book in 1965 and ran it with style and grace until 2016. His regional and national print publications were essential resources in every court, law library, government legal department and major firm across the country (not to mention major universities around the world), with most of them achieving semi-official case reporter status in their specific jurisdiction. His MLB Key Number System was an (often preferred) alternative to the Canadian Abridgement, and his digital initiatives (including first Canadian legal publisher accessible through a public website – 1997, and first commercial publisher to provide free, unedited access to its full case law collection – 2008) were pretty groundbreaking for their day.

An innovator through and through. There’s no question in my mind that had he started his career in the 90s or early 2000s, we’d be regularly reading about his legal AI scale-ups and international impact.

Consider just his free access move (called Raw Law). This is the kind of audacious, structurally disruptive gesture that Silicon Valley would have turned into a keynote. He practically considered it an obligation, writing in 2011 that judicial decisions are part of the legal commons and reminding readers that since 1995 MLB never claimed copyright over judicial decisions, just their own headnotes.

Why did he start MLB? It surely wasn’t because he had an AI strategy that needed decades to mature, no, it was to respond to an urgent need for access to law.

In Eric’s own words published here on Slaw:

In 1965 the Maritime Provinces Reports (a Carswell publication) published one volume per year and the volume contained 40 to 50 cases from the four Atlantic provinces. The Dominion Law Reports (a Canada Law Book publication) was very selective and contained very few cases from the Atlantic provinces.

A New Brunswick lawyer might find less than five New Brunswick cases published in a 12 month period. In 1965 all New Brunswick Supreme Court judgments were filed in the Registrar’s office in Fredericton. But most of these judgments were not published anywhere.

Eric operated Maritime Law Book well into his late 80s, and contributed to Slaw into his 90s, with his last contribution extolling the virtues of digital books. This was a man made for all eras.

Before any of this, Eric Appleby was a championship hockey player and spent time in banking and big law in Manhattan and Baltimore. As a defenseman for the Montreal Royals in 1949, he helped win the Memorial Cup in an eight-game series against the Brandon Wheat Kings. His teammates included a young Dickie Moore, future six-time Stanley Cup winner and Hockey Hall of Fame inductee. I like to imagine Eric’s potential roads-not-taken, and given his size and lifelong fitness, the prospect of him lacing up the skates alongside Dickie, “Rocket” Richard, “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, Jean Beliveau and Jacques Plante is not that far fetched. Lucky for us he chose law and chose New Brunswick.

We can also be grateful that he did not limit his contributions to creating a competitive legal information market to the work he did throughout his career. His choice in 2016 to pass the stewardship of the MLB collection and court relationships to a startup instead of allowing them to be absorbed into the CanLII, Westlaw or Lexis collections was the only way we would be stepping into a future where a powerful Canadian player like Clio would be able to enter the Canadian legal publishing market in 2026.

It was my great pleasure to know, collaborate and correspond with Eric for a decade. We shared a passion for supporting access to legal information and for converting that access to understanding (my passion informed in large part by his example).

While serving as CanLII’s CEO, Eric and I collaborated in 2012 to connect MLB headnotes to CanLII’s case law, again in 2014 when MLB was a founding (and major!) contributor to the launch of CanLII Connects, and a third time in 2015 when MLB allowed CanLII to apply topical overlays from the MLB Key Number System to CanLII’s cases (complete with links to related cases on MLB).

After he announced in 2016 the planned closure and liquidation of Maritime Law Book, he graciously took my call and entertained a pitch I developed with my long-time business partner and friend Warren Tkachuk. I can guarantee you that up against Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, CanLII and whoever else came knocking, ours was the riskiest and certainly far from the most lucrative proposal Eric would have received. Every bit as much as the decision he made in the 60s to start, and in the decades that followed to innovate and persevere, the decision to keep his legacy independent created the conditions that will allow Clio to deliver on the vision we’ve all had for a competitive and innovative legal knowledge environment in Canada.

From launching Compass in 2016, collaborating with vLex through 2017 to 2023, launching Jurisage with AltaML in 2021, merging Jurisage with CiteRight in 2023, to receding into the background role of supportive Jurisage shareholder since 2024, I’ve held out hope for the idea of delivering on a future that honours the foundation he created. Through Clio’s commitment and energy, that future feels like it’s really happening.

Thank you, Eric, and thank you to everyone who built and sustained the original Maritime Law Book, for making this possible.