A new web page (BCjustice.com) is focused on “the hard facts from the British Columbia court system” and has information that was formerly hard to obtain, and usually only with the help of a lawyer, according to the president and CEO of BCJ Services Ltd. Its emphasis on commercial litigation has already won it a following in the legal and business community.
“When the BC courts system placed its reasons for judgment databases on-line several years ago now, it was a huge step forward in terms of public accountability and access,” said Stephen Pyle of Nanaimo. “But the data was not available through a simple Google search. We saw an opportunity.”
Pyle began copying, downloading and organizing written judgments from supreme and appeal courts of British Columbia, then arranging judgments into sections conductive to browsing.
Many of the sections deal with commercial litigation - including real estate, taxes, foreclosures, liens, building contractors and so on – with others devoted to different areas of the law.
The site-searchable, updated-daily database encompasses the years 2008 to 2012. Judgments from this year and 2011 are available for free, but prior years require subscription, Pyle said.
