Leave no user behind. That’s the mission of CanLII’s drive to generate plain language summaries of current legal decisions, legislation, and historical case law with AI.
CanLII (Canadian Legal Information Institute) is Canada’s most popular legal information database. It was founded by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada and it exists to provide free, efficient, and open online access to judicial decisions and legislative documents. Unlike many legal databases, CanLII doesn’t require a paid subscription.
Every day, a wide variety of visitors log on searching for relevant legal information. While legal professionals are top users, many people in the general public regularly access CanLII, such as solopreneurs, researchers, law students, journalists, self-represented litigants, and people just curious about laws or legal matters. In 2025 alone, its site had nearly 23 million visits, with more than 9 million users from Ontario.
Access to justice is central to the organization’s vision as it embarked on a national initiative to produce bilingual summaries of Canadian cases and legislation. It’s a monumental task that would take immense amounts of time and money. Having neither, CanLII is using AI to expand access. The multi-phase project, Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Summarize Ontario Primary Legal Information, is funded in part by a Responsive grant from The Law Foundation of Ontario, as well as other law foundations across Canada.
“Our user base is the most diverse of any legal research platform in Canada,” says Brenda Alm, Manager of Partnerships and Content at CanLII. “The AI-generated summaries have to work for a legal professional who’s in a hurry, and also for someone who has never read a judgement before,” Brenda explains.
The summaries are structured to reflect how legal reasoning actually works, and written in plain language. For case law, this means breaking down the legal information into the following categories: facts, procedural history, issues, decisions, and rationale. Legislation summaries follow a different structure suited to statutory content.
By using AI, CanLII is also extending access by language. “We’re in a bilingual country, and so enabling Canadians to search and discover laws and court decisions nationwide in English or French for the first time matters deeply,” says Brenda. “Language should never be a barrier to understanding the laws that governs us.”
Another key element of the project is transparency. Every summary is clearly marked as AI-generated. And, dynamic linking within the summarized text makes verification, deeper research, and finding specific information easier.
“Users trust CanLII’s AI summaries because they link directly to the authoritative sources,” notes Brenda. “It’s grounded and verifiable. It’s not that black box that generally makes people feel uncomfortable about AI, especially in a legal context.”
Early feedback from users has been positive. “The summaries reduce the time and expertise required to find and understand relevant legal information,” explains Brenda. “They’re helping users screen relevance and grasp the main point of a case much faster.” Notably, the project is also keeping AI-driven legal tools from becoming exclusively the domain of those who can afford a commercial subscription. “It’s what access to justice actually looks like in practice: fast, simple, and free access to the law,” adds Brenda.
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