About the RCIC App Legal Research crawler
If you found this page from a User-Agent string in your server logs, this is the right place. Our crawler is not active yet; this page describes how it is built to behave, and the commitments we will hold it to when it is.
Who operates it
Investatech Inc., a Canadian software company. RCIC App is a subscription research and practice-management platform for Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultants. We are not a government body, not a court, not a regulator, and not affiliated with any of them.
Our crawler identifies itself on every single request as:
RCICApp-LegalResearch/2.0 (+https://rcicapp.ca/legal-research-bot; al@parsai.ca)We never disguise our identity, never rotate User-Agent strings, and never crawl from residential or proxy address pools.
What it retrieves
The published decisions and reasons for decision of federally constituted Canadian courts and tribunals, and the listing pages needed to find them. Nothing else.
- We do not retrieve court forms, filings, or case-management data.
- We do not attempt to reach anything behind a login or a paywall.
- We do not reproduce editorial material such as headnotes, case summaries, captions, or cases-cited lists.
- We do not expose retrieved decision text to public search engines. It sits behind subscriber authentication and every page carries a noindex directive.
Under what authority
We rely on the Reproduction of Federal Law Order (SI/97-5), which permits anyone to reproduce, without charge and without requesting permission, the decisions and reasons for decisions of federally constituted courts and administrative tribunals, provided that due diligence is exercised on accuracy and the reproduction is not represented as an official version.
We satisfy those two conditions as follows:
- Accuracy: we retrieve only from the issuing court's own website, never a third-party copy, and we store the source URL, the retrieval time, and a content hash for every document so we can detect and correct drift.
- Not official: every decision we display and every document we export carries a notice naming the issuing court as the source, linking the original, and stating that our copy is not an official version.
How it is built to behave
- At most one request at a time per host, with a minimum 2-second gap between requests.
- We read your robots.txt, cache it for 24 hours, and honour it, including Crawl-delay. If your Crawl-delay is longer than our own interval, yours wins.
- Bulk retrieval runs only between 01:00 and 06:00 Eastern time. Outside that window we make only small numbers of conditional requests.
- We send conditional requests (If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since), so a document we already hold and that has not changed costs your server a 304 and no body.
- We apply a per-host daily request ceiling in addition to the interval.
How to slow us down or stop us
You do not need to ask us, and you do not need to explain why. Any one of these works:
- Add a rule to your robots.txt. We read and obey it:
To slow us instead of stopping us, set a Crawl-delay in the same block.User-agent: RCICApp-LegalResearch Disallow: / - Return HTTP 403 or 429. After 2 consecutive such responses we stop requesting from your host automatically, and we do not resume on our own. A person has to review it and restart it deliberately.
- Email us at al@parsai.ca and we will stop. No conditions.
We would also genuinely prefer a sanctioned alternative. If your registry can offer a bulk feed, a data extract, or an API, we would rather use that than crawl your website, and we will switch to it as soon as one is available.
Contact
A person reads this mailbox and will reply. Requests to stop are actioned before they are discussed.
This page describes the crawler only. It is not legal advice and does not purport to bind any court or tribunal.