Anyone who is doing their own legal research will benefit from accessing Court Services Online (CSO) E-Search from a courthouse library computer. We don’t charge you fees for features you’d have to pay for elsewhere.
Whether you are a lawyer, law student, paralegal, intermediary, or a self-represented litigant, using CLBC's account on one of our public access computers means access to:
- View Provincial and Supreme Court case files to see what documents are filed, the parties involved, outcomes from hearings, and deeper case basics
- Download PDFs of available court documents
- Download a PDF of the file summary report
- Print out file documents (where available)
Some benefits of using CSO E-Search
- Find useful precedents for how lawyers have prepared court forms in similar cases. And if you are a lawyer, you won’t incur fees that need to be charged back to the client.
- Find pleadings that contain the legal basis for a case with references to other leading cases, important legislation, and court rules.
- Learn how to fill out legal forms, such as Notices of Claim, Responses, and other documents—so if you can’t afford a lawyer, you will at least have some examples to learn from.
For help using the system more effectively, see this CSO E-Search User Guide.
What information can I expect to find?
Depending on a file's access restrictions (some things are not made public), the information you will be able to view includes:
- File number
- Type of file
- Date the file was opened
- Registry location
- Style of cause
- Names of parties and counsel
- List of filed documents
- Appearance details
- Terms of order
- Caveat or Dispute details
What is CSO not good for?
CSO is not good for:
- Almost anything family law related (except very limited details for Supreme Court family files)
- Any cases involving children (i.e., adoption, child protection, youth criminal files)
- Affidavits, which might be available if you go into a registry and ask for the paper file, but are not made available online
- Supreme Court criminal proceedings