Law Society of Ontario Tip on Finding Unreported Ontario Decisions

Know How, the blog of the Law Society of Ontario's Great Library, regularly posts very useful research tips.

It recently published one entitled Finding “Unreported” Ontario Decisions: Unreported, but not Unretrievable?

As the text explains, it may surprise some people but there are decisions (not only from Ontario but also from other Canadian jurisdictions) that have not been published and that do not appear in any of the big legal research databases.

It outlines some of the basic steps for tracking down these elusive rulings. 

The basic steps are:

• contact the courthouse where the case was heard
• find out about any offsite storage sites
• for much older cases, contact the provincial archives.

I know that many of the same steps can also apply when trying to find "unreported" cases from many other provinces.