The Ontario Report, the semi-official law report published under the mandate of the Law Society Act, has finally gone digital after more than a hundred years in print. I was very excited about the online edition when I first received the news.

Today I had a chance to take my first look at the online edition. While it’s billed as “digital,” the report looks exactly like the print version. The publisher seems to have taken the plate sets and simply put them online. Readers must “flip” through the pages one or two at a time to find what they are looking for.

For the generation that grew up with Google, the layout is antiquated and frustrating to navigate.

While a “search” option is indeed available, this primitive feature produces fragmented results. For example, when I searched the phrase “sexual assault,” (a phrase that’s commonly seen in the Report) results include “common assault,” “assault,” and “assault with weapon.” Each search result was listed in a different link, making it difficult to locate the desired document.

Further, the scope of each search appears confined to a single issue. In other words, a database comprising archived cases is not available. For a comprehensive database search, you will have to subscribe to QuickLaw, a commercial service operated by the same publishing company.

Clearly the technology for a more user-friendly interface exists; the commercial version of the database works just fine. Unfortunately, it’s apparently unavailable for most lawyers, whose membership dues include  subscription to the Ontario Report ($355 per volume plus GST), but not the commercial database of archived case.

I suppose the layout may have been designed to remain exactly the same in order not to frighten those lawyers who still dictate or write out their emails for the secretaries to type out. However, the lack of improvement is a huge disappointment for the Google generation, who want something more than the plate set being scanned and put online.