Comparison of Tools to Search Canadian Law Firm Websites

The Stream, the blog of Courthouse Libraries BC, has posted a comparison of 3 search engines for finding material on Canadian law firm websites.

The tools are:

• Ted Tjaden's Custom Google Search of Canadian Law Firms
• Fee Fie Foe Firm Canada
• Lexology

To run the comparison, the 3 following searches were conducted:

• the 2008 Supreme Court of Canada decision in Keays v. Honda Canada Inc., which clarified the nature of damages that can be awarded on the termination of employment
• the new British Columbia civil rules of court, scheduled to come into force in July 2010
• the Apology Act, which came into force in Ontario in April 2009, following the lead of several other provinces, including British Columbia in 2006

The Stream concludes:

"On features, Lexicology is certainly the strongest. You can filter searches by country, by topic, or by firm. Lexicology also offers a number of slick additional features, including the ability to build customized RSS feeds, to use sharing tools, and to link to related articles. In addition to its relatively limited coverage of Canadian firms, Lexicology’s main weakness is that you need to register to search at all (although registration is free)."

"As Canadian law firms publish more and more content to the web, tools that help us find this content will become more valuable. It's great to see specialized search tools like these ones show real promise"