Sites like this one often extol the virtues of the many free case law sites on the Web. But the reality is that the free case law sites are just like their paid peers and no site has a comprehensive collection of every opinion. Whether they are omitted because of age, failure of the courts to make them available, or editorial decision, not all opinions make it into legal research databases.
What do you do if you can’t find it? The first thing is to make sure you have simplified your research as much as possible. If you are using a free site like CanLII or LexisNexis’s free case law, review your search query. Law librarians can probably all remember a time when a lawyer asked for a case and the party name was incorrectly spelled, or it was in the wrong court.
Before you bail out on the free sites, confirm party names or use just one part of the name (“Dominion”) rather than the entire name (“Dominion Coffee Beans, LTD”). Just because there is a corporate name doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been abbreviated in some way. A quick search on CanLII for Dominion Bridge returned 21 cases. But if you search for Dom’n you get 2 additional cases that do not appear in the original 21.
Some cases de-identify cases, so Smith v. Smith becomes S. v. S. Your case may be there but just not using the term you are looking for. The same thing goes for legislation. Statutes and regulations may have popular names that do not actually appear in the language of the law, and so a search using those will fail. For example, the USA PATRIOT Act is often called the Patriot Act in Canada, but USA is part of the acronym, not a country identifier. Focus on the content of the law and see if you can find it by using specific keywords rather than popular names.
The same goes for specific key words in cases and legislation. If you find that you are searching for a phrase and not getting results, try starting with a single word or two. Then slowly expand your query to fine tune your results. This is particularly true when you are using a legal term of art, like “time is of the essence”. There are good chances that the phrase are used just as expected, but opinions are written by individuals and they may not always use the term in the same way.
One of my favorite examples is marijuana, also known as mary jane, or spelled as marihuana. If you are looking for cases based on a word that might have multiple spellings, see if your search site allows for wildcards to replace part of the word. For example, if you search on CanLII for mari*uana, with an asterisk replacing the j or h, you will retrieve cases with both spellings.
If you still can’t find the case, call a law librarian and see if they can help you. Many Canadian provinces and U.S. states have law libraries that serve the local or provincial bars. Academic law libraries take calls from alumni. See if someone can confirm that the case isn’t available for free, and perhaps direct you to an alternative site with the case or provide the case to you directly.
