Overview

Legal Research helps you find and organise Canadian immigration law from inside your practice platform. It has four tabs: Legislation, Case law, Workspaces, and a Premium Research assistant. Open it from the app launcher or the sidebar.

A workflow layer on CanLII, not a replacement for it. For case law we hold metadata only (the citation, court, date, subject, and a citation graph) and link you to the full decision on CanLII to read it there. For legislation we hold the full statutory text of a curated federal collection, so you can read and search inside it. It supports your research and does not provide legal advice.

Legislation search

The Legislation tab searches the full text of federal statutes reproduced from the Justice Laws Website (IRPA, IRPR, the Citizenship Act, the Criminal Code, security and human-rights statutes, and the immigration court and tribunal rules), in English and French. Type keywords or a quoted phrase.

Filter and sort. Narrow with the Instrument filter: pick Acts, Regulations, or Rules, or a single instrument such as IRPA. Set an amended from / to year range to focus on recently-changed provisions. Results are a sortable table — click Instrument, Section, Cited by, or Amended to sort, and Best match returns to relevance. Each result links to the official version on Justice Laws.

Case-law search

The Case law tab searches Canadian case-law metadata 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. Use the court chips and subject dropdown to narrow.

You cannot search inside the text of a decision here — we hold metadata only — so every result carries a link to read the full decision on CanLII.

Citation explorer

On any case, choose Show citations to see what it cites, what cites it, and which legislation it engages. Relationships are neutral: cites and cited by only. We do not tell you how one case treated another (followed, distinguished, and so on) — read the decisions on CanLII to assess treatment. Follow the graph from a known case to related authorities you might have missed.

Workspaces and cited report

A workspace is a folder for a matter. From any search result or the citation panel, choose Save to workspace to collect cases and statute sections, then add your own notes.

Cited report. Export a workspace as a cited research report (PDF, in English or French) with every authority's citation, link, and source attribution, ready to drop into a memo or file. A saved authority keeps its citation and your note even if the underlying index entry later changes.

Watchlists

Create a watchlist to follow a court or subject, or to watch specific case citations. When a new decision lands that matches your court or subject watch, or cites a case you follow, you get an email. A court or subject watch must carry at least one facet — a watch with no facets would match everything and is rejected.

AI Research Assistant (Premium)

On Premium, the Research assistant drafts a fully-cited research memo. Ask a question, or attach a document such as a procedural fairness letter, and it identifies the issues, searches our own index, and writes the memo.

Closed by design. It has no access to the open web or to the text of decisions, and it can only cite authorities it actually retrieved from the index. An automated compliance check rejects any memo that cites something outside the index, omits a citation or link, or claims what a decision holds — so it tells you honestly when your question needs a full-text search it cannot do, rather than guessing. An attached document is used for that one request and is not stored. Each run uses one of your firm's monthly research runs.

Sources and disclaimer

Case and legislation metadata are provided by CanLII, with a link to the full decision on every result. RCIC App is not affiliated with or endorsed by CanLII. Federal statute text is reproduced from the Justice Laws Website under the Reproduction of Federal Law Order, SI/97-5, and is not an official version; metadata is a pointer, not a substitute for reading the decision. The text of the Constitution Acts (including the Charter) is not carried here; the Legislation tab links you to it on Justice Laws. This supports your research and is not legal advice; you remain responsible for your professional conclusions.