Research Guides: Current Awareness: Staying Up to Date in Law: Case Law

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Case Law

Staying up to date with case law can be achieved via a variety of methods. The most common methods are court alerts and citator alerts.

Specific Courts

Many courts allow you to subscribe to email notifications for new decisions, including:

Supreme Court of Canada
Subscribe to receive an email notification for newly released decisions.
Federal Court of Appeal
Subscribe to receive an email notification for newly released decisions.
Ontario Court of Appeal
Subscribe to an RSS feed ("What are RSS feeds?") for newly released decisions.

Supreme Advocacy LLP offers 3 free newsletters:

SCC Weekly
This weekly newsletter delivers to your inbox summaries of the latest Supreme Court of Canada decisions the morning they are released (usually Thursday or Friday). They cover both appeals and leaves to appeal.
SCC Weekly + Student Extras
Students can sign up to also receive continuing legal education materials geared towards young lawyers, tips and tools to having a successful legal career, and copies of SCC precedents (factums and memorandums) for Applications for Leave to Appeal and Appeals.
Appellate Monthly
This newsletter looks at what’s happening in the appellate world before it gets to the highest court in Canada. Each month it features must-read court of appeal summaries, looks at recently opened files at the SCC vying for leave to appeal, and gives you a snapshot of cases granted leave.

Citator Alerts

A case citator is a research tool that lists cases that have in some way mentioned, followed, overruled, or discussed a specific case. The following tools allow you to receive an alert when new cases are added.

For more information on case citators, see our Legal Research Manual.

Lexis Quicklaw Advance Plus QuickCITE
Once you've found a case you want to monitor, note up the case. From there you can set up a QuickCITE Citator Alert using the bell icon. For more information, see the Lexis Advance Tip Sheet: "Create an Alert".
Westlaw's KeyCite
Once you've found a case you want to monitor, note up the case. From there you can set up a KeyCite alert using the bell icon. For more information, see Westlaw's "KeyCite tip sheet".
CanLII
Once you've found a case you want to monitor, select "Set up citation alert". Note that you will need a free Lexbox account to set up an alert.