For more than two decades, the legal world has celebrated a major achievement: open access to law. Judgments are available online. Legislation is searchable. The idea that primary legal materials should be publicly available on the internet is no longer controversial in most jurisdictions. But availability is not the same as usability.

A database full of PDFs is technically “accessible.” A statute that can be downloaded is technically “available.” Yet for many users, including lawyers under time pressure, small businesses, journalists, students, and self-represented litigants, legal information often remains difficult to navigate, interpret and understand.

The next phase of digital legal publishing is no longer about access alone. It is about making legal information usable, and ultimately meaningful, to the people who rely on it.

The gap between access and use

The early years of online legal publishing solved a distribution problem. Courts and legislatures moved from print to web. That transition was transformative and necessary. But much of what followed reproduced the print model in digital form.

Judgments are often uploaded as static documents. Legislative amendments are incorporated through processes that may be technically accurate but difficult for users to trace. Search functions return long lists of results without clear explanations of relevance. Citation trails must be followed manually. Context must be reconstructed by the reader.

For experienced practitioners, these challenges are part of the craft of legal research. For others, they can be barriers.

Usability requires more than posting documents online. It requires thinking about how different users interact with legal materials:

• How quickly can they identify whether a document is relevant?
• Can they understand its core holding without reading 60 pages?
• Are related authorities surfaced intuitively?
• Is the current version of a relevant statute clearly identifiable?
• Are updates integrated promptly and coherently?

In short: does the system help them make sense of the law?

From publishing documents to enabling understanding

At Lexum, our efforts to improve access to Canadian public legal information over the past three decades have gradually shifted focus from simple publication to meaningful access.

When we began publishing Supreme Court of Canada decisions online in the early 1990s, the innovation was straightforward: make authoritative judgments freely available on the web. With the creation of the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) in 2000, that commitment expanded to include courts and tribunals across the country. Over time, however, it became clear that access alone was not enough.

Users needed more than documents. They needed structure. They needed reliable citation systems. They needed search tools that surfaced the most relevant results first. They needed legislation that reflected amendments clearly and consistently. They needed contextual signals that helped them interpret what they were reading.

What makes legal information usable?

Usability has several dimensions in the context of legal publishing.

1. Structure and consistency

Legal texts exist within networks: cases cite other cases; statutes are amended; regulations depend on enabling provisions. If those relationships are not structured and interconnected, users must reconstruct them manually.

Consistent metadata, stable citations and automated linking between authorities transform isolated documents into navigable systems. What was once a static file becomes part of a living web of legal meaning.

2. Speed and currency

Timeliness is central to usability. A decision that cannot be found quickly after release, or legislation that does not reflect recent amendments, undermines user confidence.

Modern publishing workflows increasingly rely on automation to accelerate posting. Structured ingestion systems can extract key information (court, date, judges, citations) as soon as a document is released. Legislative updates can be integrated into consolidated texts without prolonged delays. Speed, when combined with oversight, strengthens trust.

3. Orientation and context

Perhaps the most important dimension of usability is orientation. Legal reasoning is dense. Decisions often span dozens of pages before reaching a clear conclusion. For users approaching a case for the first time, understanding its relevance can be difficult.

Here, technological tools, including AI-assisted summaries and classification systems, play an important supporting role. A concise explanation of a decision’s core issue and outcome does not replace reading the full judgment. But it allows users to determine quickly whether deeper engagement is necessary. Similarly, thematic categorisation and citation mapping help users see how a case fits within a broader doctrinal landscape.

The role of AI: assistance, not substitution

Artificial intelligence has accelerated the shift toward usability. Lexum has designed systems extracting metadata from files, detecting citations, generating summaries and classifying documents at scale. Thanks to these tools, tasks that once required hours of editorial effort can now be completed in minutes. Publication timelines shrink. Newly released materials become searchable and contextualised almost immediately.

But AI does not define meaningful access. It supports it. Human expertise remains essential for designing workflows, validating outputs and ensuring alignment with institutional standards. In this new environment, editorial judgment shifts from repetitive processing of individual files to supervision and refinement of tools. Prompt engineers replace copy editors.

When properly integrated, AI reduces friction in legal research. It lowers technical barriers, especially for non-expert users. It enables natural language interactions with databases rather than rigid Boolean syntax. It helps explain why a particular result appears relevant in a few sentences rather than having to parse through pages of text. In this sense, AI acts as a bridge between raw legal texts and user understanding.

Why usability matters beyond the profession

Improving usability is not only a concern for legal professionals in need of immediate answers to their client’s issues. It also has broader implications for the legal system.

An informed public is better equipped to make decisions, comply with legal obligations and resolve disputes efficiently. Small businesses can assess regulatory risks more confidently. Journalists can report on legal developments more accurately. Students and researchers can explore doctrinal evolution more systematically.

For self-represented litigants, usability can be particularly significant. Clear summaries, intuitive navigation and interconnected sources reduce cognitive load in an already stressful context. While such tools cannot replace legal advice, they can provide orientation within a complex system.

If enriched and intelligible legal information is available only through expensive subscription platforms, inequalities deepen. Public legal information systems play a critical role in ensuring that baseline understanding is not restricted to those with deep pockets. Meaningful access, in this sense, is a democratic value.

The institutional dimension

Making legal information usable requires more than software. It requires institutional commitment. Courts, tribunals and legislatures must view publication not as an administrative afterthought, but as part of their public mission.

International experience shows that partnerships can support this evolution. Platforms such as Norma by Lexum, developed to assist courts, regulators and legislative bodies in managing structured workflows, aim to embed usability within institutional environments themselves. Rather than outsourcing understanding of the law to privately-owned databases, the objective is to enable public bodies to initially publish in ways that are inherently navigable, searchable and contextualised. This approach has been adopted by wide range of public institutions, including the Supreme Court of Canada, the New Mexico Compilation Commission and the Arkansas Judiciary. Lexum supports each of these organisations with its SaaS legal publishing platform, powering the section of their website dedicated to accessing legal data.

In New Mexico, for example, the state moved away from a subscription-based system for annotated legislation and appellate decisions. Instead, it now supports a free statewide legal information portal offering advanced search, a legal citator, and AI-powered summaries of judicial opinions. In Arkansas, the judiciary abandoned printed law reports entirely in favour of a digital-first publishing model. These are not incremental improvements; they represent a rethinking of online legal publishing as public infrastructure.

When legal materials are structured consistently from the outset, benefits accumulate. Efficiency gains transform into savings. Features, such as search, linking and summaries improve. Analytics become possible. User experience strengthens all over the access chain.

After three decades at helping over a hundred public institutions moving from access to meaningful usability, Lexum has recently begun working with its first UK partner. This marks the beginning of a broader effort to engage with UK courts, tribunals, regulators and law societies on how structured publishing workflows and AI-assisted enrichments can strengthen public understanding of the law.

From access to meaning

Thirty years ago, Lexum’s ambition was to put the law online. Today, that is the baseline expectation.

Thanks to AI we’ve reached the next level in this quest, which is to ensure that legal information is not only available, but usable: not only searchable, but understandable. It is a natural next step for people and institutions interested by open access to law. This meaningful access is measured not by the number of documents online, but instead by how effectively people can engage with them.

That is the standard toward which legal publishing is now moving and Lexum is committed to supporting UK institutions aiming at reaching it.

Pierre-Paul Lemyre is a founder of Lexum, a pioneer in online legal information delivery. A member of its leadership team from research lab to CanLII acquisition, he has helped shape the evolution of digital legal publishing in Canada. Outside work, he is an avid mountain biker and backcountry skier.

Photo by Emilie Pelletier @emiliepelletierphotographe.