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TECH SUPPORT The new (old) kid T he organization that launched the first legal information web site in Canada and later developed CanLII with the Federation of Law Societies of Canada wants to help your firm manage its legal information better and interact with it more easily. LexUM Inc., originally a research lab in the law faculty at the University of Montreal, transformed itself into a private corporation in April when the directors purchased the business from the universi- ty. Now LexUM is targeting new markets — including law firms — with document management and enterprise search prod- ucts it developed over years while work- ing on government and non-profit proj- ects. It believes its solutions can compete head-to-head with products from major commercial software vendors. "What we want to push is technology solutions that simplify the way people interact with legal information," says Pierre-Paul Lemyre, LexUM's head of products and business development. "It could be a web site for a government LexUM, a University of Montreal law faculty lab, goes private with new enterprise search and DMS products. BY GERRY B LACKWELL department or an intranet for a law firm, or helping a court manage its workflows. For any client managing legal informa- tion, whether on the web or internal, we have the expertise to help them do it more efficiently." LexUM began in 1992 with a project initiated by its director, professor Daniel Poulin, to publish Supreme Court of Canada decisions online. They initially appeared on a gopher bulletin board, but soon after moved to the web. It was not only the first Canadian legal informa- tion web site, but the first anywhere in French, notes LexUM deputy director Ivan Mokanov. The lab took on related projects, including putting legislation and regulations online for the federal Department of Justice, throughout the 1990s. Then in 2000, it started working with the Federation of Law Societies on a pan-Canadian project that would eventu- ally become CanLII. CanLII today is a widely used, entirely free, central online repository of legisla- tion, regulations, and court and tribu- nal decisions from across the country. LexUM still develops, hosts, and manages CanLII as well as the DoJ sites it built. "We progressively built up our team over that period," says Lemyre. "The common element was always publishing legal infor- mation for free on the Internet." That started to change in the 2000s as the lab began to diversify and also work on projects in developing countries, such as Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chile, to publish their legal information online. In 2005, it spun off as an autonomous lab within the university, the first step to privatization. "We've developed a lot of [software] code and learned a lot of things over the last three or four years," says Lemyre. "And we began offering more elaborate services, going well beyond the boundary of pub- lishing legal information." The decision to leave the University of Montreal was easy. Both the university and the lab "agreed that the best way to make LexUM sustainable was to spin it off into a private company," says Mokanov. The lab was already self-supporting. While it www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com SEPTEMBER 2010 21 on the block MATT DALEY