Légis Québec

Project Overview

Légis Québec - Web Site to Disseminate the Revised Statutes and Regulations of Quebec for Legal Professionals

Client: Les Publications du Québec
Mandate: Designed and developed an Internet site on which users could consult and search through Quebec's statutes and regulations
Solution: XML-based Web site, data stored in TeraText
Services Provided: Analysis, development, project management
Technology Used: XML, TeraText

Read also: L'Historique des lois en un clic !, Journal du Barreau, Septembre 2005 (in French)

Client's Problem

With the goal of promoting access to Quebec's statutes for the general public and law professionals, Les Publications du Québec, the publishing house of the Quebec government, wanted to modernize its system for disseminating the statutes and regulations of Quebec.

Indeed, these statutes and regulations were available on paper and on CD-ROM, but the revised versions did not reflect the changes to these statutes throughout time.

As well, law professionals had to spend hours researching and looking through pages and pages of statutes to find the statute text or version of a statute section that they needed.

Les Publications du Québec needed a system that would disseminate the statutes and regulations of Quebec on the fly and provide a history of the statutes as well as advanced search features.

Solution Proposed

Irosoft recommended an XML-based Web site using a native TeraText XML database to store the documents. A Web dissemination module provides the most recent version of the statutes in real time as the user consults it.

Results

Statutes are updated on the Web site very quickly.
Increased reliability of statute texts published.
Site users can perform an advanced search by statute, by section, by keyword, by government department, by date and by title.
Users can search in the collection of revised statutes or in past statutes.
The research work of law professionals is largely simplified since they can trace the history of statutes in both English and French, and consult a given statute for a specific point in time.

Client's Comments

"Your professionalism and knowledge allowed us to reach our objectives."

Sylvie Ferland,
Head of the Official Publishing Department,
Les Publications du Québec

Strengths

Users can search for and consult sections of a statute for a specific point in time.
All versions of a given statute can be viewed.
A search engine allows searching by statute or by section of statute.
Alerts are sent via e-mail each time a new publication appears on the site.