Colin Lachance

2Oh, but that's not right.

4The first full-time CEO.

6We'll cover the truth on that. Yes,

8Hey, Pulat, thank you very much for having me. It's fun to be here. I've been enjoying your episodes.

10Originally from Manitoba, grew up in Winnipeg. Go Jets!

12That's right.

14It counts as the prairies.

16No, no. So we were 9 years in Edmonton, so the, the first 5 years of my legal career were in Edmonton. I grew up in Winnipeg, did a business degree there, and when applying to law schools, I I grew up living near the University of Manitoba. I had done summer camps there and so on. I did my business degree there, knew every building inside and out. I had taken classes in the law school building there. So it was a desire to go somewhere else for my education that led me to the University of Alberta. That and the fact that the other schools I applied at rejected me.

18That's right. Yeah, I articled at a 20-lawyer firm, sort of general activity firm. I did everything from a little bit of criminal, family, employment, some tax, child welfare, a lot of stuff while I was there and I finished my articling on a Friday and the following Monday I was working for TELUS as a public policy lawyer in its regulatory affairs department.

20Yes.

22A lot. So from 1998 up until I started with CanLII in 2011. I was in various capacities in-house. So I was 5 years in Edmonton with TELUS, moved with TELUS to Ottawa as it was expanding its public policy and regulatory affairs department in the city where the decisions were made around federally regulated telecommunications. After a year there, I moved into a lobby group of cable companies. So in the early 2000s, cable companies were getting into the telecom business. So I moved over as Director of Telecom Regulatory Affairs for the Canadian Telecommunications— Canadian Cable Telecommunications Association. So a lobby group of the big players like Rogers and Shaw and so on. And From there, after a couple years, they— or a year and a half or so, they shut down when Shaw left as a member.

23And then the next day, Shaw rang my phone and said, you want to come do our telecom regulatory work? But then things got a little weird after that. TELUS called me back and said, instead of coming back as a lawyer, we want you back as a marketing director. Because as an in-house lawyer, I always prioritized figuring out how to do it, whatever it was, whatever we were trying to accomplish. I wanted to figure out how to do it. And telecom being a heavily regulated area, particularly on the wholesale side the wholesale marketing vice president said, well, you understand our business, you understand telecom, whatever gaps you have in marketing, we'll make sure you learn it on the job.

24And so while for that 3-year stretch, I wasn't acting as in-house counsel. I, I maintained active status, and I would occasionally do work that would dip into both the regulatory and the legal side. Like, one example was we were devising a strategy to create a, a new structure for some large contracts with some of our larger with wholesale clients, and these are contracts in the tens of millions and hundreds of millions. And the strategy encompassed, well, what is the corresponding regulatory strategy? And what is the corresponding legal strategy? So one deal in particular, I helped work on the regulatory strategy, devised the business strategy, and when it came time to sign, to draft the contracts, legal said, here, Colin, you do the first draft.

25And they did the work after that. And then after that, I moved into lobbying as a director of federal government affairs. So it's a weird thing where being a lawyer, then being a marketer sort of combines together to say you're a lobbyist because now you're being persuasive with PowerPoint instead of with briefs.

27Yep.

29Yeah, I've described my career as always being at arm's length from an engineer. So both within the teams I'd work in, because right from the beginning, so 1998, while hired as a lawyer, I was hired into a multidisciplinary team. My colleagues weren't exclusively lawyers, they were MBAs, they were engineers, and then they were, you know, people coming from other disciplines. And so the exposure to technology, both at an infrastructure level as well as at an application level, was constant throughout all of that.

31That was an interesting thing. Because there was nothing in my resume up to that point that said this person should be the CEO of CanLII. But in making that application— so CanLII put up this job post in fall of 2010, so 10 years ago. I had just started doing a part-time LLM with concentration in law and technology. Right. I saw the post. It looked really interesting. And I, because I was familiar with CanLII, didn't use it a lot at that point, but I was familiar with it and I liked the concept of it. But my exposure to, again, internet technologies, being sort of near the dot-com boom and bust and everything that went through it, seeing the, the evolution of platforms as a service.

32That was already happening. The concept of APIs— well, we didn't necessarily call them APIs. The group I was responsible for as a marketing director in, in TELUS essentially had database DIPs, which are basically APIs, like web services. We just didn't call them APIs. So seeing all those pieces together allowed me to approach the job posting with a story. To, to say, I did upwards of like 70, 80 hours of research even to create my first initial application to be considered by the headhunter to move forward. So I analyzed CanLII's history, CanLII's peer group, the evolution of free access to law and digital access to law in Canada and globally, the commercial peer group, and then again seeing parallels in other industries, telecom being one, but, you know, most digital industries, anything involving transport and supply chains and so on being, you know, others.

33It allowed me to approach the, the hiring committee with a vision of who CanLII was, what it intended to be from the people who created it a decade earlier. And this is where I say I wasn't there at the original. I was I think it's more accurate to say I was there at the inflection point. And so I came through with a vision to say, here's everything that I've discovered, everything I've learned. Here's all sorts of stuff about— I remember looking at tools like Alexa and ComScore and other things like a decade ago to say, like, here's page views, here's where the traffic comes in and out, here's the utility, here's value and all that.

34And so as it turned out, the board had itself recently done some strategic planning, and I arrived with a vision that was reasonably well aligned with where they were going. And again, I just want to sort of be clear on the part— I don't want to take credit away from the people who actually created CanLII. So the people who created CanLII are the Federation of Law Societies' Lexum, who was then a lab at the University of Montreal, and probably the hardest working person in all of this outside of those groups was Janine Miller, who is the librarian at the Great Library at Osgoode Hall. She was the project director for CanLII's first decade, so while doing that, while working full-time for the Law Society, managing the library.

35She's the one who, with the others, helped push it forward. Where I had the opportunity to come in is about 7 or 8 years into CanLII's growth. The law societies, the owners of CanLII, began to reach the conclusion that they weren't the ones controlling it, that they had a representative board, somebody who was you know, a rep from Alberta, from Manitoba, from every law society, and they— that group was more or less agreeing with the recommendations of LexIM, and that's where the brains, the strategic planning was mostly coming from. And so the law society said we need to create an independent skills-based board that has the expertise to oversee an organization like what CanLII is and what CanLII can become.

36And that board's first mandates have to be to hire a full-time CEO and devise CanLII's first independent strategic plan. So when I came in in 2011, that was already a decade into CanLII's evolution, and that was the point of the mandate. So, you know, I take no credit for all the hard work and the vision that that went in the establishment and the creation and building the foundation of CanLII. I feel incredibly blessed that I had the opportunity to work with such talented people in order to move it from a thing that was nice to have and was the foundation of something that could be great to something that is now, by any measure, indispensable to the Canadian legal market.

37So I'm grateful for the opportunity I had to be there at that time. And contribute in that way.

39That's right.

41Google's '98. 97, 98.

43Facebook didn't exist.

45I mean, the inspiration, like, a lot of it comes down to in 1993 at Cornell University, two professors Tom Bruce and Peter Martin, created the Legal Information Institute in the U.S., and they did it They had to create a browser because in 1993 browsers didn't really exist in order for that to be possible. Around the same time Lexum, Daniel Poulin at Lexum, was publishing Supreme Court of Canada decisions on Gopher. Now you have to be old or really geeky to even know what Gopher is at this point. And so the visionaries were there. Australia, you know, created AustLII, Graeme Greenleaf and Andrew Mowbray and Philip Chung in 1996. So by the time 1999 came around, what you had as the driving factor for those groups, like these innovators, was to say, look, we know what the commercial access thing is going to look like.

46We know how spotty the free access thing is. Something has to be done on a larger scale. Or else we're not going to like the way things are going to roll out. So, so yeah, it's, it's really incredible to, to look at the vision and the effort that was put in over 20 years ago. It's against that whole idea of like the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. And thankfully for the rest of us now, somebody did.

48Yes.

50Or was there anybody else?

52Well, there's a— I mean, there's a big long list of advisors and so on, but effectively, that's— those are the groups. So you had Lexum, who had devised a technological method for collecting and publishing case law, and you had the law societies who viewed it started to become aware of the necessity, like that there's other threads to the story, right? Like, anybody does copyright law is familiar with the CCH case from 2004, where a legal publisher sued the Law Society of Upper Canada, as it was then known, for a photocopying service of cases. So lawyers from outside of Toronto would say, I need a copy of this particular case, the Law Society library would photocopy it and send it off.

53So there was a copyright claim. So that was one of the other drivers. So if you want to give credit again to sort of where the impetus came from, that was one of it too, because if the Law Society is potentially facing this world where commercial providers were going to be able to lock down through copyright, case law and the dissemination of case law. And so the law societies as regulators, as protectors of the professional competence of their members, took it upon themselves to create or to fund— like, the initial contribution 20 years ago was $500,000 on a 16-month pilot project, and it started with 20,000 documents. And, and so that took a, a lot of guts for the law societies to try to, to do, to, to try and push that forward.

54A lot of vision.

56Daniel Poulin.

58So again, globally, if you look at what Cornell has done, what AustLII has done, and what CanLII has done, you have these groups of people. Daniel at University of Montreal and a couple of his colleagues who came on shortly thereafter who have been along for the ride and been a key part of it. As well. But Daniel is really the one who brought the story forward and said, hey, look, here's what we're doing at University of Montreal. Here's what's happening. But the idea of law as a data source actually dates back— like, you can look at the stories of the founding of Quicklaw, for example, and trace its origin back to the '60s. You can look at the Centre for Research in Public Law out of out of the University of Montreal.

59And again, like, programmatic access to law has been a research topic in Canada for over 50 years. So even people like Daniel relied on people who came decades before him for the inspiration, like Hugh Lawford, who founded Quicklaw. All these kinds of things sort of bubble along in the Canadian ecosystem. And one other person, again, who, while not part of the CanLII story, I think is part of the same, Canadian legal innovation story that's worth mentioning is Eric Appleby. Eric Appleby founded Maritime Law Book. And when we get into the other parts of my story in the Compass, you'll know that, you know, I'm trying to carry his legacy forward with what we're doing right now.

60But in his case, he did, he did a couple phenomenally innovative things. He started a law publisher in Fredericton, New Brunswick in the late '60s because print publishers weren't publishing New Brunswick case law. And he expanded that into a national business and at the high point had over 70 employees doing this. Maritime Law Book was also the first World Wide Web accessible legal research platform in, in Canada. In 1997, www.mlb.nb.ca, which was where you would go to access their digital research tool. In that year, Quicklaw, you know, that's the year I graduated law school, and Quicklaw was available and it was great, but it wasn't on the web. It was tunneled through like a private data service.

61So there's a lot of phenomenal innovation that we're all building on top of. But yeah, on the CanLII side, without Daniel Poulin, It doesn't exist.

63Yes.

65Yeah, so the things I'm most proud of are creating that bigger push into secondary source material, working with Lancaster House, putting the employment law text up in 2012, the creation of CanLII Connects as a vehicle to show both the users and creators of secondary legal source content that CanLII was a place where it can come. So in 2014, CanLII Connects went live with 27,000 case summaries and case digests and so on. And the other one, which hasn't served in CanLII's continuous growth, but again, I'm phenomenally proud of it, was the CanLII API. The, the, the element that would allow people to access CanLII metadata in order to begin to create their own services. So, you know, I started my job in at the beginning of 2011.

66By the end of 2011, I had that, the creation of an API on the roadmap. By the end of 2012, I had the funding for it. And at the beginning of 2013, it was out and available. And then in 2013, we hosted— so in 2013, that means we had probably the first— globally, the first API that covered a country's entire legal system. And in 2013, we probably also hosted— and you were there— the first legal technology hackathon in Canada. So that's something I'm immensely proud of, and it drives what I'm doing right now. The motivation behind creating those elements drives what I'm doing with the Legal Innovation Data Institute.

68Ilya.

70Sure. So the way I explained it to the law societies in 2011, 2012, was to say, pick up your phone and look at the weather app. Because even then we had a weather app. Said, you know, do you think that the person who made that app is the one going out and collecting all the temperature data? Like, they're getting it from somewhere. This is— there are sources in that that exist to gather, clean, organize, and, and turn data into an input for other downstream applications. Sometimes those sources only apply to their own creations. Other times those sources allow for access to it and that the access doesn't have to be in the form of, here's a giant database, a giant spreadsheet.

71It's in the form of a periodic web service call to basically say, I need a piece of data, send it to me. And then the piece of data is sent back into the application that the requesting party has created. So the weather app on your phone, the reason you can have 2 or 3 or 4 different weather apps is because whoever is actually collecting the weather, whether it's, you know, Environment Canada or somebody else, makes that data available via an API so that it can be accessed and used in support of integration as well as the creation of new services. So that's the way I've, I've always explained it. Engineers might, you know, say, no, that's not exactly right.

72But when you're explaining an API to somebody who you're asking for money in order to fund the API, that worked.

74Well, again, you know, it's less so about a service like CanLII, but more about a service about what can other people do with legal data. So let's talk about Lexis for a minute. So, so Lexis on Quicklaw has Microsoft Office for, for Quicklaw. And that's been around for years. And that's something where when you're working on a Word document, you have the ability within your Word document to call elements of the Lexis database without using the Lexis or Quicklaw interface. So in legal, this is a way to access the intelligence that you need without switching the tasks away. So that's at a user level. At an aggregate level, APIs are important for exposing intelligence and other details to somebody in a way that is secure.

75So if I give you an Excel spreadsheet that has a pile of data, you have access to it, you're making copies of it, you can, you know, go off and do something. I've effectively lost control over it. But if I expose that same information to you via API, you, you as a creator can get the same utility out of the data without me losing control. Over it. And if an element— and in legal, this is an important one— if an element of the source information behind the API changes, we don't all have to reprogram it. I don't have to give you a new Excel spreadsheet with it, with a new copy of the data.

76I can just ensure that next time you call the API to request that data piece, it sends the updated information. So within legal, the ability to integrate services with each other and with primary data sources, I think it's incredibly dependent on APIs.

78Yes, that was my intent in in pulling it together. As I understand it right now, the CanLII API, if you go to the CanLII website, there's a reference to the API and it will take you to a GitHub page. And that's basically just a, let's just call it like a document page that explains what the API is. But there's no immediate process available to gain access to the key because the communication to access it, I don't know what CanLII's current practice is for issuing keys. To use the API is. I know their documentation is visible, but if somebody approaches them and asks for a key, I don't know what their process is right now.

80I, I don't think, you know, in fairness, I don't think you ever could. Even, even in the version that, that we had developed. What we had developed initially was something that allowed you to call lists of information to get deeper and deeper into the metadata. So metadata of a case includes things like who's what court is it, what's the date, what's the citation, what's the case title, who's the judge, you know, what are the parallel citations, and so on, what's the link to it, that kind of metadata. Under the original API that we created You would say, I— in order to get that level of data, you might have to first call to say, I need a case from the Alberta Court of Appeal.

81So I need a list of all the cases. Now I found the case I want. I need this. And there was a separate API that could search to let you find it. The— it's the kind of thing that could, I'd say, improve whatever service that that you've built, but it was never, I think, in a position where you could independently build a business on top of it. Like, you know, people might remember the earlier days of Twitter. You weren't just using the Twitter app or TweetDeck or something like that. You were using whatever particular Twitter client made the most sense for you. That was a form of API that allowed for building businesses on top of it.

82CanLII API, as we set it up and as it is right now, is about, calling for pieces of information that can be used to augment and improve. Now, some people can create something quite effective out of that. And again, I don't want to speak for CanLII. I left in 2015. I can just say my observations of the level of availability and the promotion of it right now suggests that CanLII does not prioritize use and adoption of its API. It exists, it hasn't removed it, but I'm not aware of it prioritizing it or promoting it.

84Oh, that's a good question. So I was asked that often when I was there, and CanLII receives— CanLII and all Legal Publishers receive content from the courts, either under arrangements that have been in place for decades or under specific terms of agreement. In CanLII's case, there have been some courts that have limited its permissions to use that content only on its own website. So that suggests that CanLII does not have the ability. There's different views on that, and I mentioned the CCH case, which says that it's public domain, that case law is public domain and that there's no copyright inherent in the body of a case. But at the same time, Crown copyright says the copyright in the case law can go to the courts.

85I've had senior legal officials of courts say, no, the judges believe that they hold the copyright in their decisions and so on. So can we— Whether CanLII can or can't is, is a question that I think everybody would like to resolve because CanLII has the best collection, the best, most public collection. Lexis and West probably have more data, but they'll have the best, most public collection. So it would be good if CanLII could. CanLII's The Crown's view is that it cannot. Its view that it's expressed recently in the past couple of years to parliamentary committees and in, you know, as an intervener at Supreme Court is that Crown copyright is the barrier.

87Yes.

89Yes. So there's two aspects to that. So there's the legal environment and then there's the practical environment. So the legal environment, again, in a Supreme Court case, I can't remember if it was Keatley or Knight. I think it was Keatley. I've forgotten already. But the Canadian Association of Law Libraries put forth the argument that Crown copyright doesn't protect, it was never intended to protect judgments or legislation, so primary law, because it was only intended to protect documents created by the Crown in its executive capacity, not the Crown in its legislative capacity or its judicial capacity. And so it tried to ask the court to speak to that, and the court did not. But both CanLII and the Canadian Association of Law Libraries have through copyright lobbying efforts.

90He tried over many years to make these— to make this point. So yeah, if Section 12 of the Copyright Act changed to say, you know, there's no Crown copyright associated with primary law, which is the legal status of this in the US based on like longstanding precedent on statutes and regulations and judicial opinions and a more recent Supreme Court decision in the US on on edicts of government and running legislation. So that's the status in the US. The practical limitation here is the parties that we should be asking to make this broadly available are the courts, the creators of the content. The creators of the content should make it available in bulk in a way that it can be used more broadly by everybody.

91Because they aren't and because lobbying and trying to convince, you know, 47 or 60 different courts to change their process, that's kind of futile. That sort of leaves us in the position of saying, well, if we can't fix the legislation and we can't make all the courts change, then we have to focus our attention on the people who already have access, the publishers. Like, who's already been put in a position to collect this data, and maybe they can do something with that. That's why a lot of people, myself included, have suggested that CanLII is probably in the best position to do it. CanLII, under its current strategic plan for 2020-2024, doesn't have this anywhere in its priorities.

92It's really focused on building secondary— more broader secondary source material, which is laudable, but it doesn't have this as a priority. So that sort of leads us to say, well, how do we get there? And so what the Legal Innovation Data Institute is going to do is, yes, it will participate in the lobbying efforts on legislation. It will work with participating courts to encourage them to make the data available in bulk and go further by providing the infrastructure to make that possible. So what we've already done is we've created the infrastructure to take the entirety of the Compass collection, which I mentioned Maritime Law Book. Compass is the successor to Maritime Law Book, has all its historical stuff, has MLB's seat at the table to receive all the new cases and publish it.

93And Compass currently publishes it through a company called VLEX, and I was associated with VLEX for for a few years as part of the buildup of Compass. But Compass essentially said, we have a compilation of data. And again, copyright lawyers will correct me if I, if I, you know, misstate this, but there's a difference between copyright in a compilation and copyright in an underlying document. And I can claim copyright over a compilation even if I can't claim copyright over an individual document in that compilation. So Compass has licensed its compilation into the Legal Innovation Data Institute, and so that includes all the courts outside of Quebec. But the Legal Innovation Data Institute is going to go to each of those individual courts and say, we would like to license or acquire your data directly into the same platform that we're using, so that way somebody doesn't have to rely on the license component, it'll just, you know, come through as source.

94And so now what we're saying— this ties us back to our API conversation— is we'll manage privacy considerations, we'll manage API considerations, we'll manage, you know access bulk access rules and, and data usage agreements and all that. We'll manage all of that. And so that's the offer that the Legal Innovation Data Institute is beginning now to put out to individual courts. Oh, we lost your volume.

96Yes. So we are creating that layer of abstraction. And I would say not to hide the technical and legal issues, but to manage the technical and legal issues. So we call it a trust, a data trust. So we know within the data trust that we are stewards of the data. We're managing. On the public interest in that data, as well as the public interest of parties that are mentioned in the data. So one of the reasons courts have been reluctant to make this available in bulk, or to limit who gets access to bulk information, is because of the privacy issues. They don't like the idea of 100,000 decisions sort of being put up on, on Google to be indexed, because none of the publishers index the body of the decisions.

97And so what we're saying is, you know, send it to us, we'll manage that, we'll ensure that that doesn't happen on the downstream side. So that's an element that we want to manage because this lets us get more information into more hands for more creation. Now, whether or not existing publishers become members of the institute and users of the data through that flow. The door is open. It would be a great idea. I'd love to see it happen. And so I, I, I want to have those conversations with existing publishers as well. But in the meantime, what we're starting with is members and organizations outside of the group. So that includes a company out of Alberta called AltaML.

98They're like a 100-person company that didn't exist 3 years ago, now has 100 people doing commercializing machine learning services. And so they're moving into legal data. And so they're a member, they're getting access to the data, they're working with it. BG Communications, a translation firm that does legal Pharmaceutical and high-end engineering intellectual property translations, wants to work with the data to enhance its ability to serve the Canadian bilingual and bi-juridical legal environment on translation matters. Law school clinics, the Legal Data Science Lab at the University of Ottawa under the Centre for Law, Technology and Policy, they have a lot of plans that they want to do in legal data text mining, on analysis of the substantive aspects of law to do better empirical research.

99The Conflicts Analytics Lab at Queen's wants to build free access apps, like in the manner of like a Blue J, and they've already started doing that. So there's a lot of innovation that we're enabling right now, but in order for Canada to really level up, like you said, like a massive explosion, we need to sort of move to a point where all of the data is accessible to as many people as possible for as many creative uses as possible. And so the idea in creating the Legal Innovation Data Institute is a recognition that there's no player independently that's in a position to do that. So we created the core to allow that to grow.

100I mentioned CanLII started 20 years ago with $500,000 and 20,000 documents. So we're starting with less money, but 400,000 documents. And we're starting with APIs, we're starting with access to information. We're doing projects to make that even go faster and further. We're doing a project with a company called Private AI to allow us to create de-identification tools in case law. So we're not just hiding every name of Mary Smith. We're only hiding Mary Smith as party or witness, but not Mary Smith as judge. We're not hiding the name Mary Smith as counsel. We're not hiding these elements. So creating not just the layer of abstraction, but another layer of data that can be put into even more hands with less concern because we've even automated it in an effective and public-serving way.

101So these are the kinds of things that the Institute is pursuing.

103Several different ways. Membership is open to any organization that wants to use the data for internal or non-commercial applications. So internal, if you're a law firm and you want to improve your internal knowledge management system by building internal apps that tie into other databases within your system that tie the primary law, your member— your firm's membership in the organization advances all those public interests goals that we have. If you're a lawyer and you want to assist some of our nonprofit groups, we have people— some of these groups, the for-profit nonprofit, need guidance on what applications should they be focusing their efforts on. Other aspects, if there's a startup that you think is just amazing and they, they, they could be assisted by working with this data initially to build out a proof of concept, We've created a sponsor category that says instead of getting like a full membership, you can sponsor a project of a worthy group to help them move forward.

104So there's a lot that lawyers can do, you know, from using it themselves, assisting those who are using it by guiding on where the needs and priorities are, and sponsoring others who can be— who know what they want to create, but they just need access to the data.

106It is a priority. So where we are right now, as I mentioned, Compass has these relationships. Compass is licensing its data, you know, in, in particular terms. So And because, you know, I'm on Compass side and I'm on LIDI's side, yeah, I've got, I've got the relationships to advance it. The other thing that we've done in the creation and in the advancement of this is, you know, I've had dozens and dozens of conversations with people with courts and with different aspects of ministries across Canada, both people still in these roles as well as people who've retired out of them, to really understand where the concerns are. And now that we're literally, you know, 15 days since we've launched, we've got enough of a story out there publicly that we're packaging it and we're beginning that outreach to talk to people to say, okay, now we'd like to add these federal tribunals to our collection, we'd like to add these provincial tribunals to our collection.

107Ministries of Attorney General, provincial and federal, are good for the tribunals, because they can, from a political perspective, say, direct the tribunals to just send it over. Courts, you have to work your way up through the hierarchy to get the permissions and so on. So nobody's really in a position to lean on a court. So we'll take our time and work that through, through sort of the back and forth that we've already begun of educating to give comfort that we're not sort of breaking any rules or any norms, but also to show how we can advance. And then within our advisory group, we have people like Meredith Brown, for example, who was— she was general counsel to several deputy attorneys general in the past.

108She was the executive director of the Innovation Office with the Ontario Ministry the Ministry of Attorney General, well connected with these folks. So within our advisory group, we have people that can help us move these things forward. But any individual lawyer who has an idea, wants to get involved, love to hear from them, too.

110So LIDI.ca, you'll find who's involved, what our priorities are, what projects are already underway, different ways of getting involved. All that information's there. We're adding in details of, you know, as we get mentions in— earlier this week, Canadian Bar Association had an article that included a discussion of us. Last week it was a Law Times. On another launch, other blogs in the US and the UK took note because the model that we've created doesn't have a parallel. It takes inspiration from a lot of the free access to law groups, a lot of the innovators who were there in the '90s coming up with the ideas and stressing the importance of getting access to law.

111So we take a lot of inspiration from groups like that, from the Harvard Case Law Access Project and so on. We've got relationships with all these places, but the model itself is new. It doesn't exist like this. And so we're working within the unique constraints of of the Canadian history and the Canadian legal and practical environment in order to sort of elbow our way to become bigger.

113Yeah, yeah, I appreciate the invitation, and I hope you don't mind, you know, how many rants I went off of. As you can tell, I'm pretty passionate about this.