TL;DR: Hyperlinking in CaseLines is hard, but CiteRight does most of the work automatically for you– and we're working on the rest.
If you don’t already know, the Superior Court of Justice has been pushing CaseLines as a go-to presentation and collaboration tool for litigants. The use of CaseLines has expanded into various court operations over the past few months. It’s also available across other provinces to use on a voluntary basis, and we’ve heard courts in British Columbia are already on board.
CaseLines is a great tool for making sure that judges and other parties can conduct hearings electronically– it puts a truly paperless trial within the realm of possibility. It lets litigators say, “Your Honour, please look at Tab 3 of the transcript,” and everyone can find Tab 3 in one click. The future is here!
But . . . the CaseLines user interface leaves a little bit to be desired. One of the things that makes it most useful – the ability to link your factum to a specific point in the record or to a specific court case – is one of the hardest things to actually set up.
Here’s the good news: CiteRight does half the work for you automatically (and we’re hard at work on getting the other half done, too)!
CiteRight hyperlinks to case law automatically
Normally, if you want to redirect the reader to the specific quote that you cited from the caselaw, you would have to use the hyperlinking tool in CaseLines. If you’re an advanced Word user, you can add the hyperlink manually to each reference before printing or saving as a PDF.
But, CiteRight has a shortcut: when you use CiteRight to save a case (from CanLII, for example), it will automatically collect the URL. Then, when you cite the case, you can simply set your preferences to include the source hyperlink in each citation.
We’ll even link to the specific paragraph that you cited!
Once you convert your Word documents using CiteRight, you can upload them to CaseLines where the hyperlinks will be included automatically – no extra work required. Pretty neat, right?
Check out our video on how CiteRight to make formatting and uploading documents to CaseLines easier:
What about linking to other documents in the record?
We’re working on that. Promise.
At CiteRight, our mission is to make it effortless to comply with ever-changing court requirements. We’re hard at work on making sure that when you create a document with CiteRight, all the hyperlinks will carry over automatically to CaseLines. For now though, we’ve fought half the battle and solved part of the problem— and it’s going to save you a huge chunk of time and work.
If you want to know more, our team is happy to show you a demo on how CiteRight can transform your practice. Book a demo with us now or check out our training videos.
