Canadian Legal Dataset
Overview
Our Canadian Legal dataset provides comprehensive coverage of federal and provincial court records, including civil and criminal cases. The data is normalized and structured to focus on key case participants—plaintiffs, defendants, and material parties—enabling accurate risk screening while minimizing false positives from legal representation and court personnel.
About this data
Scope - Canadian Federal & Provincial Courts
This dataset covers litigation records from:
- Federal Court of Canada
- Federal Court of Appeal
- Supreme Court of Canada
- Tax Court of Canada
- Provincial and territorial superior courts
- Provincial courts of appeal
Data Collection Approach
We aggregate court records from federal and provincial court systems, including CanLII (Canadian Legal Information Institute) and other publicly accessible court databases. Our collection process systematically retrieves case data from each jurisdiction, applying advanced normalization and entity resolution to create a unified, searchable dataset across all Canadian courts.
The data is sourced from official court registries and validated against multiple authoritative sources to ensure accuracy and completeness.
Participant-Focused Normalization
Similar to our approach with PEP data, our legal dataset is meticulously normalized to focus on the key participants of each case. We systematically filter out legal representation (lawyers, law firms), judges, court staff, and other ancillary roles to reduce noise and potential false positives.
This participant-focused approach ensures you're screening against actual parties to litigation—those with material involvement in legal proceedings—rather than filtering through thousands of irrelevant attorney and judge records that create screening noise.
Each participant record includes:
- Party type (plaintiff, defendant, appellant, respondent, etc.)
- Case type and subject matter categorization
- Court jurisdiction and level (federal vs. provincial, trial vs. appeal)
- Case status and disposition
- Filing and resolution dates
- Name variants and entity identifiers
- Cross-references to related cases where applicable
Structure & linkages
Cases are tagged by jurisdiction (federal/provincial), case type (civil, criminal, administrative), and court level. Participant records are linked to their cases with temporal tracking and provincial/territorial attribution, enabling you to identify litigation patterns, assess risk exposure across jurisdictions, and perform comprehensive background checks.
Frequency of updates
Our Canadian Legal dataset is updated regularly to capture new filings, case developments, and decisions across federal and provincial courts.