2026 is already shaping up to be another big year for the Canadian Open Access Legal Citation Guide – Guide canadien de la référence juridique en accès libre. Read on for recent milestones, new instruction materials, requests for feedback, and ways to get involved.

RJAL Launches

RJAL, the French version of COAL, was released in February 2026! It is now possible to use COAL-RJAL to cite legal materials when writing in both English and French, an important step in serving the legal community in both official languages. Read more on CanLII and Slaw.

Celebrating Our Early Adopters

There has been a dramatic shift in our personal lives, schools, and workplaces from buying and owning cultural materials like books, music, movies, and television, to licensing (i.e., subscribing to) these materials. Digital materials should be easier to access and use, however in this new environment activities like copying, sharing, and reusing cultural materials are governed by contracts rather than by the Copyright Act and its users’ rights like fair dealing. Additionally, in the digital age we can no longer separate the object (e.g., a book) from its content (the copyright-protected text) – actions such as lending or reselling a . . . [more]

My perception, supported by a good deal of evidence, is that some people and businesses favour, and indeed boast of those assets and competences which they already have and from which they are trying to profit; they sometimes play down the worth of products, services and content which they do not have and through which they cannot trade for potential profit. Therefore, to take an example, they might trumpet the significance of blogging in legal markets, while referencing, to little or no extent, the infinitely more dynamic sources of added value legal authority, viz. the authoritative . . . [more]

Given the high value placed on research excellence by legal professionals and consultants, I am surprised that stories continue to be reported about the lack of rigour exercised in the creation of work product by these professional groups. In addition to the ongoing stories of professional sanctions placed on lawyers for including incorrect citations and other issues associated with the use of generative AI, there have been regular stories about the high values for government report contracts and the use of AI to create them. Here are some articles on a report prepared by Deloitte for the Province of Newfoundland . . . [more]

Canadians with disabilities are sure to have improved access to copyrighted works with the release of Accessible Content: A Guide to the Canadian Copyright Act on Searching for Accessible Formats and Producing and Distributing Alternate Formats by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and the Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA). Written by Victoria Owen, Alexandra Kohn and Laurie Davidson, and released on September 15, 2025, this comprehensive guide marks a significant milestone in Canada’s pursuit of practical, lawful, and equitable access to copyrighted works for people with perceptual disabilities.

The Accessible Content guide provides a clear . . . [more]

Although it is a continuing rather than a new story, I was nevertheless interested to read the recent listing by Publishers Weekly, entitled The World’s Largest Publishers, 2025. For clarity, this is a top 25 of the largest, by revenue, of all publishers in the world and not just those which publish legal information. Nevertheless, first and second on the hierarchy are Thomson Reuters and RELX. The key aspect of the latest report is that after a seven-year run, RELX has been overtaken by Thomson Reuters as the new front-runner in the grouping. In 2024, Thomson Reuters’ revenues . . . [more]

The recent barrage of copyright lawsuits involving AI companies has revealed the staggering scale of copying undertaken to train large language models (LLMs). In the recently decided Bartz v. Anthropic case, for example, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California notes that the AI firm downloaded millions of books in order to “amass a central library of ‘all the books in the world’” that it could use to develop its AI models and services.

As with the Anthropic case, the majority of these high-profile AI copyright lawsuits are being brought forward by authors . . . [more]

In pondering upon what interesting and timely topic about which to write, relating to legal information publishing, it occurred to me that what might be appreciated would be to write and repeat the word “artificial” approximately 333 times, followed by the word “intelligence”, the same number of times and finally the same again for the acronym “AI”. I wondered if readers might have found the approximately 1000-word totality of such efforts, or just the repetition of “blah”, to be as captivating as much of the other agenda-driven drivel produced on the topic, including that offered by the . . . [more]

Editor’s Note: I learned of Gary Rodrigues’ passing this morning. As one of our longstanding Slaw writers, Gary will be remembered for his incredible knowledge and stories behind Canadian legal publishing. Our ‘Legal Publishing’ group here at Slaw have always been well connected to each other. As such, I asked Robert McKay if he might be willing to compose some thoughts. Thankfully he agreed and crafted the kind tribute below. RIP Gary. :( .. Steve M.

Slaw readers and many others, among them lawyers, law librarians, legal information publishers and legal academics, in many parts of the world, will mourn . . . [more]

It has happened again; once more, v-Lex has changed hands, this time from Oakley Capital to the Canadian software company, Clio (Themis Solutions Inc.), for around US$1bn. Clio/Themis sits within the portfolio of New Enterprise Associates (NEA) venture capital firm, which previously shared in the funding of Ravel Law. Ravel, in 2017, was sold to RELX, which might indicate the future directional path of Clio/v-Lex. Harvey AI had been linked to rumours that it considered acquiring the much more established competitor, v-Lex, the alleged purpose being for the former to exploit the latter, to assist growth. That notion . . . [more]

Welcome to my 100th and final column for Slaw. It all started innocently enough at the outset of 2008 when the late Simon Fodden, innovative founder of this venue, invited me to contribute a column on scholarly publishing issues. I first wrote of how the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) was now requiring those it funded to make the resulting research freely available, if after a 12-month delay (to appease publisher pushback). I called it at the time a “tipping point” in the growing efforts to secure public or open access to all research worldwide.

Now, some seventeen . . . [more]

It is normally frowned upon to suggest that experiences from the past might be indicators of outcomes in the future. The problem is that invariably to follow that line runs a significant risk of naivety, for want of understanding that history does indeed frequently repeat itself, and humans are inclined to repeat their own mistakes, as they search to replicate their successes from the past. It was, therefore, noteworthy that the global US-based law firm, Cleary Gottlieb, has acquired the small London-based AI-focused startup, Springbok AI, the latter described in The Lawyer as “a challenger to the Harvey . . . [more]