Most successful enterprises strive to understand their users and make data-driven decisions. But Canada is experiencing a data deficit about its legal system and many common legal issues that Canadians face every day.

Canadian governments and courts have a paucity of data on Canadian trial and appeal decisions. Unlike New Zealand, for example, Canada’s federal government does not track how long it takes s. 96 courts to issue decisions. Only the Supreme Court of Canada maintains such a public database. Canada’s statistics agency has embarked on the pursuit of gathering better data about its courts. But unfortunately its current data is inadequate.

This legal data deficit hampers our ability to understand the legal systems’ users and to implement user-focused, data-driven reforms. In comparison with the United States, empirical information about our judges, litigants, and legal disputes is very limited. In many cases, it’s non-existent—e.g., we don’t even know Canada’s current national divorce rate or the national rate of guilty pleas.

My research suggests that this data deficit could be a fundamental driver of Canada’s access to justice crisis.

To this end, I am generating new data and seeking to provide a comprehensive source of existing data about Canada’s legal system, including academic datasets, provincial datasets, federal datasets, court datasets, and my research datasets on Canada’s courts.