LegalCite Beta
The Book of Authorities is where all your documents are stored so that you can easily repeat citations, return to webpages, edit citation data, download documents, or create a table of contents.
Press Control + Shift + A or double click the LegalCite tray icon in the bottom right corner of your screen to open the Book of Authorities.
Press Control twice quickly, Escape, or Enter, or click Okay or the X in the top right corner of the window to close the Book of Authorities.
LegalCite documents are divided into five groups: Legislation, Jurisprudence, International Instruments, International Jurisprudence, and Secondary Sources. Each group is displayed on a different tab in the Book of Authorities.
Press Tab and Shift + Tab or the right and left arrow keys, or click the tab heading, to change which group tab is visible in the Book of Authorities.
Press N or click the Next button to flip to the next page in a group. Press P or click the Previous button to flip to the previous page in a group.
Click the white circle or number next to a document listing, type the document number, or use the up and down arrow keys to grab a document from the Book of Authorities. The selected document will be cited the next time you use the write citation feature.
Click a document’s underlined, blue title to open the document in your web browser.
Click the button with the pencil icon on the right side of a document’s listing to edit the document. A window will appear by which you can edit the following properties, as applicable: - Author - Title Format - Title - Cite 1 - Cite 2 - Tribunal - URL - PDF URL - Group - Pinpoint Type - Language
Click the button with an X icon on the right side of a document’s listing to delete the document.
Click the button to create a new book. Your previous book will automatically be saved.
Click the button to load a new book with a .legalcite extension.
Click the button to rename the current book.
Click the button to delete all documents from the book. A warning window will popup to confirm the deletion.
You can send .legalcite book files to anyone else with LegalCite via email or any other file-transfer method. Double click a .legalcite file to open it in LegalCite.
Click the Save All as PDFs button to download documents in your book of authorities.
You will first be presented with the option to deselect any groups of documents from inclusion: Legislation, Jurisprudence, International Instruments, International Jurisprudence, and Secondary Sources.
Documents will be saved in alphabetical order within their group, and the groups will be ordered as follows: 1. Legislation 2. Jurisprudence 3. International Instruments 4. International Jurisprudence 5. Secondary Sources
If any documents are already present in the folder will be renamed and numbered. Any documents already in the folder that are numbered with the same number as a document in the current download, but are no longer in the book, will have a “-“ marked before their file name to indicate they are not part of the book anymore.
In settings, you can select whether you prefer to download the official PDF version of print the webpage as a PDF.
Some documents are only accessible in one format. If a document is not available in your preferred format, it will be downloaded by the alternate method.
If any documents are being saved via print to PDF, you might have to confirm "Save as PDF" is selected in the print dialogue before LegalCite saves the document. You will be alerted by a popup message if this confirmation is needed.
Unfortunately, due to Westlaw and Quicklaw’s systems, documents from these platforms cannot be downloaded automatically by LegalCite. However, if you download them beforehand, include the citation (eg “2020 SCC 5” or “RSO 1990, c H.19” ) in the file name, and place them in the folder the other documents are going to be downloaded into, LegalCite will rename and number them to organize them along with the other documents.
During the download process, please refrain from interacting with the computer such as pressing any keys or clicking anywhere on your computer. Any interactions could disrupt LegalCite and cause the download process to fail.
If anything goes wrong, such as the process stalling, simply press Alt+A, which will abort the process and restart LegalCite. You can then re-run the download process, and, if you select the same download folder, LegalCite will pick up where it left off and correct any file-naming errors from the previous process.
Click the “Create Table of Contents” button to automatically draft a table of contents for your book of authorities.
You will first be presented with the option to deselect any groups of documents from inclusion: Legislation, Jurisprudence, International Instruments, International Jurisprudence, and Secondary Sources.
Click the “Edit Template” button to open the Microsoft Word document that serves as a template for the table of contents.
You can edit almost anything in this document, including font and text size, but do not add or delete any rows, cells, or columns from the included table or else the table of contents might not render properly.
If you make any changes that stop LegalCite from rendering the table properly, you can always restore the default template.
Click the “Restore Default” button to reset the Table of Contents Template to its original state.
If you download all the PDF documents before creating the Table of Contents and select the folder that the PDFs are saved in as your output folder for the Table of Contents, LegalCite will open and read all of the PDFs to calculate the applicable page numbers in the Table of Contents.
During this process, please refrain from interacting with the computer such as pressing any keys or clicking anywhere on your computer. Any interactions could disrupt LegalCite and cause the Table of Contents creation to stall or fail.
If anything goes wrong, such as the process stalling, simply press Alt+A, which will abort the process and restart LegalCite. You can then re-run the process.
If Microsoft Word gives you an error when you are attempting to re-run the process after an error, open Task Manager by pressing Control + Shift + Escape. In the Process tab, locate any Microsoft Word processes and close them by clicking End Task. Then press Alt + A and re-run the Table of Contents creator.
Documents will be listed in alphabetical order within their group, and the groups will be ordered as follows: 1. Legislation 2. Jurisprudence 3. International Instruments 4. International Jurisprudence 5. Secondary Sources
Titles of documents in the Table of Contents entries are discreet hyperlinks to the online version of the document.
Cases will include two parallel citations, where available, and reorder parallel citations where necessary to ensure the neutral citation is first.
Copy and paste a list of authorities into the input box to import multiple documents into LegalCite at once.
Ensure that each citation is on a new line. Much like the open document tool, you do not need to include the case or statute title. The neutral or reported citation is sufficient.
Human error in writing citations is the most common cause of issues. Always double-check that the correct documents were imported since a different document might have been imported if even one digit in a citation is incorrect.
It takes around 2-4 seconds to import each document, so, for example, a list of 60 documents could take 2-4 minutes to import.
To import documents, LegalCite analyses each citation to determine what it is. LegalCite then searches CanLII to find the document and adds it to the current book of authorities.
Once importing is complete, you will be provided with a summary. The following are the possible outcomes for each document: - Successfully Imported: the document has been added to your Book of Authorities. - Multiple Possibilities Found: there are two or more documents that match the citation provided. - No Document Found: LegalCite could not find any document on CanLII matching the citation. - Failed to Import: LegalCite found the document, but some other error caused the import to fail.
If the document is not successfully imported, you will be provided a link to grab the document yourself. Note that this link might not be useful for documents with the status "no document found" since the document may not be on CanLII, or the citation may have been entered incorrectly.