Online Publishing of the Federal Courts Reports

1. Advance Contract Award Notice (ACAN)

An ACAN is a public notice indicating to the supplier community that a department or agency intends to award a contract for goods, services or construction to a pre-identified supplier, thereby allowing other suppliers to signal their interest in bidding, by submitting a statement of capabilities. If no supplier submits a statement of capabilities that meets the requirements set out in the ACAN, on or before the closing date stated in the ACAN, the contracting officer may then proceed with the award to the pre-identified supplier.

2. Background

The Federal Courts Reports were created in 1971 when the Federal Court Act (now the Federal Courts Act) was passed. They are the official reports of the decisions of the Federal Court of Appeal and of the Federal Court. They are published pursuant to section 58 of the Act, which provides that only the decisions or the parts of them that, in the editor’s opinion, are of sufficient significance or importance to warrant publication in the Reports shall be included therein. The Reports are prepared for publication by the Federal Courts Reports section (FCR) of the Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs Canada (FJA).

FCR/FJA publishes 4 volumes annually divided into 3 parts each. These parts contain between 60 and 100 reasons for decision in full text and between 60 and 100 digests. Other features included in the Reports include lists of appeals noted and, in each Part 3, a number of tables such as lists of statutes and regulations cited, cases cited, authors cited, etc..

3. Definition of the requirement

FCR requires a commercial off-the-shelf software that allows self-publishing of past and future decisions that have been selected for publication, to the Web. The supplier will also host said decisions on its servers.

4. Scope of the Work

• Host existing (the supplier will be responsible for transferring all existing material to the new site and ensuring its functionality) and future publications of the Federal Courts Reports (FCR), including but not limited to HTML and PDF versions of individual judgments, digests and appeals noted, and PDF as well as e-book versions (see here for an example) of full volumes (referred to collectively as files or items). The existing collection of HTML-type PDF documents must also be published and must be indexed and searchable.
• Make the FCR website available in both English and French, and seamlessly accessible from the FJA Website.
• Publish the above mentioned FCR files (decisions, digests, appeals noted, etc.) on the Internet.
• Ensure automatic creation of bidirectional links between decisions and digests published on the FCR website and the full text of the original decisions on the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal websites.
• Ensure that adequate metadata is collected to facilitate the retrieval of these files by the search engine.
• Ensure that published items follow Government of Canada Standards for Web Publication.
• Provide a solid self-publication/administration tool in both English and French to delegated FCR staff. This tool must allow for the web publication of documents (in Word, PDF or other format) by dragging and dropping them into the publication tool. Notably, the tool must be able to automatically convert a PDF document into an HTML type document that is fully searchable.
• Make available a sophisticated search tool (in English and in French) on the FCR website that renders nearly instantaneous search results and provides snippets of information for each result without the user having to click on the result.
• Create and maintain a mailing list by subscription to inform interested parties of recent publications.

5. Location of Work

The supplier must host all services on its own secure server located in Canada. Help Desk Service will be offered during normal office hours.

6. Language of Work

The Platform must be available in both official languages of Canada with a button provided to seamlessly toggle between the two languages. Training, reference materials and training manuals must be available in both official languages of Canada. Helpdesk service must be available in both official languages of Canada.

7. Criteria for Assessment of the Statement of Capabilities (Minimum Essential Requirements)

Any interested supplier must demonstrate by way of a statement of capabilities that their product and services meet the following requirements:

R.1 Any software proposed must be “off-the-shelf”, meaning that each component of the software is commercially available and requires no further research or development and is part of an existing product line with a field-proven operational history (that is, it has not simply been tested in a laboratory or in an experimental environment). If any of the proposed software is a fully compatible extension of a field-proven product line, it must have been publicly announced on or before the ACAN closing date.

R.2 The supplier must have at least 5 years of verifiable expertise in processing and publishing decisions from various Canadian courts in both English and French.

R.3 The software must work and interoperate with the existing FJA and FCR websites. Transition from the FJA homepage to the FCR decision portion of the website must be seamless from a user’s perspective.

R.4 The software must be able to maintain the current hyperlink functionality. Specifically:

1) all internal hyperlinks must remain functional;
2) the existing bidirectional links between decisions and digests published on the FCR website and the original version of those decisions on the Federal Court of Appeal and Federal Court websites must remain functional; AND
3) the links described in 2) must continue to be generated automatically.

R.5 The software must be capable of processing documents written in Canadian English and Canadian French and must recognize and post Canadian French characters properly.

R.6 The software must enable designated FCR staff to immediately self-publish files, by simple drag and drop, in both HTML and PDF (the two formats being identical in content) from original files available in Microsoft Word or PDF. FCR must have the option of making those publication instantaneously available on the live website.

Full parts must be available in e-book format (see here for an example) through the same drag and drop self-publication tool.

R.7 The software must enable designated FCR staff to immediately self-publish corrected files (i.e. republication), with the same criteria as in R.6.

R.8 The software must block the automatic indexing of legal decisions by web bots.

R.9 All the decisions, past and future, must be hosted on a secure server located in Canada.

R.10 The supplier must be able to create and host a “decision site” for FCR (see links at the end of this document). The look and feel of FJA/FCR must be reproduced in the new environment (logo, coat of arms, colours, etc.). The site must follow Government of Canada Web Standards (see links at the end of this document).

R.11 All files, excluding the full parts, must be available in both HTML and PDF; the supplier will be responsible for converting documents (created in .doc, .docx or .PDF) uploaded by FCR through the Administrative Tool into these formats.

The full parts are published PDF and e-book format, with active bookmarks. The supplier is responsible for ensuring that these bookmarks remain active. The supplier will also be responsible for converting the documents uploaded by FCR in PDF format through the Administrative Tool into the e-book format.

R.12 Files created by FCR must be uploaded to the supplier’s servers using the Administrative Tool. The software will use scripts to convert the coding into metadata, which will be used by the sites’ search engine to retrieve the file(s) sought.

R.13 The software must automatically extract metadata for each decision published, including but not limited to:

• Case name (the indexed as)
• Neutral citation number
• FCR citation
• Date of decision
• Docket (file) number(s)
• Subjects
• Parties

R.14 The software must provide an administrative tool in both official languages, with both a USER and an ADMIN profile.

R.15 A search engine, in both English and in French, will be included. The software will index each published file and offer a full-text search which will include, at minimum, Boolean, wild card and proximity operator searches as well as the possibility of searching by relevance, by date or by any of the extracted metadata (listed in R.11). The search engine will provide nearly instantaneous search results with snippets.

R.16 The software must offer the possibility for users to subscribe or unsubscribe to an email notification and an RSS. These notifications will announce any new publication or republication on the website. FCR will be able to establish rules governing which type of publications are announced.

R.17 The software must be accessible and be compliant with the WCAG-2 standard as required by the Treasury Board of Canada The WCAG-2 standard is available online.

R.18 The supplier must provide technical support in both English and French by telephone and email, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. (ET) Monday to Friday.

R.19 The supplier must guarantee an uptime of 99.5 % minimum with access to the servers via HTTP and SSL protocols and daily backups.

R.20 A statistical tool must be made available through the ADMIN profile and must be capable of generating, on an ad hoc basis, reports, such as (but not be limited to):

• Number of visits by the public.
• What pages were visited.
• What searches were performed

8. Justification for the Pre-Identified Supplier

Decisia is the only known online platform dedicated to automated extraction of information from legal documents, meeting the standards in the field in accordance with The Preparation, Citation and Distribution of Canadian Decisions guide, which was adopted by the Canadian Judicial Council, and this, in both official languages of Canada.

9. Government Contracts Regulations Exception(s)

The following exception to the Government Contracts Regulations is invoked for this procurement under subsection: 6 (d) – only provider capable of performing the work.

10. Trade Agreements

This requirement is exempt from all trade agreements, based on the proprietary rights of the Contractor.

11. Ownership of Intellectual Property

Ownership of any Foreground Intellectual Property arising out of the proposed contract will vest in the Contractor.

12. Period of the proposed contract

The proposed contract is for a period of one (1) year, from April 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024. The Contractor will grant to Canada the irrevocable option to extend the term of the Contract by up to four (4) additional one-year periods under the same conditions.

13. Name and Address of the pre-identified supplier

Lexum informatique juridique inc.
910-4200 boul. Saint-Laurent,
Montreal, (Quebec), H2W 2R2, Canada

14. Suppliers’ right to submit a statement of capabilities

Suppliers who consider themselves fully qualified and available to provide the goods and services described in the ACAN, may submit a statement of capabilities in writing to the contact person identified in this notice on or before the closing date of this notice. The statement of capabilities must clearly demonstrate how the supplier meets the advertised requirements. The conditions of the developer’s shrink-wrap license are not acceptable to the Crown.

This software is proprietary, and the proposed Supplier must have the authority to negotiate the terms and conditions of the contract and the related software licensing terms including, but not limited to; limitation of liability, indemnification, transferability of license, termination/refund to the Crown. Documents may be submitted in either official language of Canada.

16. Closing date for a submission of a statement of capabilities

The closing date and time for accepting statements of capabilities is March 15, 2023, at 12:00 p.m. ET.

17. Inquiries and submission of statement of capabilities

Daniel Morin
Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs Canada
99 Metcalfe Street, 8th Floor
Ottawa, ON K1A 1E3
Tel: 613-947-6339
FJA.Admin@fja-cmf.gc.ca

18. Definitions and links

Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs Canada: http://www.fja-cmf.gc.ca/home-accueil/index-eng.html#

Federal Court Reports: http://reports.fja-cmf.gc.ca/eng/index.html#search

Government of Canada Web Standards, established by the Treasury Board, include the following standards:

Standard on Web Accessibility – http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx?id=23601
Standard on Web Usability – http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx?id=24227
Standard on Web Interoperability – http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx?id=25875
Standard on Optimizing Websites and Applications for Mobile Devices – http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx?id=27088&section=text
Web Standards for the Government of Canada – http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/ws-nw/index-eng.asp
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/