As a young lawyer trying to learn the ins and outs of practice, it can be difficult to stay on top of recent jurisprudential developments. This article provides four tips on how you can keep up with current case law and maintain the requisite level of competency to represent your clients.
1. Subscribe to the RSS feeds from the Supreme Court of Canada and the Court of Appeal for Ontario (and/or any other appellate court(s) releasing cases relevant to your area of practice)
An RSS feed is a content distribution method that provides you with updates when a website, such as that of the Supreme Court of Canada, publishes new material.
Both the Supreme Court of Canada and the Court of Appeal for Ontario offer RSS feeds that you can subscribe to through your Outlook account. You have to go to the respective court’s website so that you can copy the link for the RSS feed you are interested in. You then have to right-click on the RSS Feed folder in your Outlook, then click on “Add a New RSS Feed”, and paste the link you got from the court’s website into the pop-up box. After a few seconds, a subfolder should pop up under the “RSS Feed” folder in Outlook, and voilà! Every time the Supreme Court of Canada or the Court of Appeal releases a document under the RSS feed you subscribed to, you will receive an e-mail to the specific subfolder in your Outlook RSS Feed folder. You can then open the e-mail, click on the link, and access a full version of the document.
The Supreme Court’s RSS feeds can be found here:
https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/en/rss/index.do.
The Court of Appeal for Ontario’s RSS feeds can be found here:
https://www.ontariocourts.ca/coa/rss-feed/.
I recommend that you subscribe to the Supreme Court of Canada’s RSS feed for “Supreme Court Judgments” and the Court of Appeal RSS feed for “Decisions of the Court: All Decisions”.
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