Legal Research
Search Canadian legislation and case law, map how authorities cite each other, and organise your research, without leaving your practice platform. Full statute text you can read and search, case-law metadata with a link to the full decision on CanLII, and a Premium AI assistant that drafts a fully-cited memo.
What you can do
Full-text federal legislation
Read and search the full text of a curated federal collection, IRPA, IRPR, the Citizenship Act, the Criminal Code, security and human-rights statutes, and the immigration court and tribunal rules, reproduced from the Justice Laws Website in English and French. Filter by Act, Regulation, or a specific instrument, and sort by how recently a provision was amended or how many cases cite it.
Case-law metadata search
Search Canadian case law by party name, citation, court, date, and subject across the Supreme Court of Canada, Federal Court of Appeal, Federal Court, the Immigration and Refugee Board, and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. Every result links straight to the full decision on CanLII to read it there.
Citation mapping
For any decision, see what it cites, what cites it, and which legislation it engages, then follow the citation graph from a known seed case to related authorities you might have missed. Neutral 'cites' and 'cited by' relationships only, never a characterisation of how one case treated another.
Cases citing a section
See how many decisions in the index cite a given Act or Regulation, and sort your legislation results by it, so the most-litigated provisions surface first.
Authority workspaces
Save cases and statute sections into a workspace for a matter, add your own notes, and keep your research organised file by file. A saved authority keeps its citation and your note even if the underlying index entry changes.
Cited research report
Export a workspace as a cited research report (PDF, in English or French) with every authority's citation and link, plus the source attribution, ready to drop into a memo or a client file.
Watchlists and alerts
Follow a court or subject, or watch specific cases, and get an email when a new decision lands that matches or cites a case you follow, so you never miss a development in an area you practise.
AI Research Assistant, with document upload (Premium)
Ask a research question, or attach a document like a procedural fairness letter, and a Premium AI assistant identifies the issues, retrieves only from our own index, and drafts a fully-cited memo. It has no access to the open web or to decision text; it can only cite what it retrieved, and an automated compliance check discards any memo that oversteps. Attached documents are used for that one request and are not stored.
How it works
- 1
Search legislation and case law from the Legal Research tab. Read federal statute text in full, filter and sort your results, and open any decision straight through to CanLII.
- 2
Map citations, save the authorities that matter into a workspace, add your notes, export a cited report, and set watchlists for the courts and subjects you follow.
- 3
On Premium, ask the AI Research Assistant a question or hand it a document, and get a fully-cited memo grounded only in the index, with a link to the full decisions on CanLII.
Pricing
Search, the citation explorer, workspaces, the cited report, and watchlists are included on both Basic and Premium. The AI Research Assistant is a Premium feature, with a monthly pool of research runs per firm. Case and legislation metadata are provided by CanLII, with a link to the full decision on every result; federal statute text is reproduced from Justice Laws under the Reproduction of Federal Law Order, SI/97-5. RCIC App is not affiliated with or endorsed by CanLII. This supports your research and is not legal advice.