About the Data

LawOnline.ca Canadian Legal Directory is a free, public directory of Canadian law firms and lawyers. Its listings are compiled and written with the help of AI. This page explains, step by step, how that happens, what we do to keep the listings accurate, and where the process still falls short.

AI reads each firm’s own public website and turns it into a listing. Automated checks and a separate AI review try to catch mistakes, and we check samples by hand. Even so, a listing can be wrong, incomplete or out of date, and we can’t guarantee it’s accurate. Always confirm details on the firm’s or lawyer’s own website, and confirm a lawyer’s licence with their regulator. If something about you is wrong, tell us and we’ll hide the listing right away while we fix or remove it.

How a listing is made

1Find the firmPublic business listings, searched area by area, plus a hunt for firms with no website listed

2Read its websiteOur crawler saves the firm’s own public pages: home, about, team, bios and contact

3AI drafts the recordAn AI model turns those pages into structured fields under strict rules

4Automated checksScripts test every record against the source pages and our rules

CorrectionRecord fixedWrong fields corrected, bios edited or rewritten, or the entry taken off

5Independent AI reviewFor fuller profiles, a separate AI checks every claim against its quoted source

CorrectionClaim fixed or cutThe bio’s rewritten around what the source supports, or the profile’s held back

6PublishedWith the month the data was gathered and a link to the lawyer’s regulator

7Human spot checksWe check random samples of live listings by hand against the firm’s own site

CorrectionListing correctedThe bio’s edited or rewritten, and a new automated check catches the same mistake everywhere

Manual submissions

Correction or removal requestSent through a listing’s link or our form

Hidden right awayThe listing comes down before anyone reads the request

Human reviewA person reads the request and checks the record

EditedRecord corrected, bio rewritten if needed, then republished

RemovedRecorded so a later update can’t bring it back

1. Finding firms

We start from public business listings, mainly Google’s, which we pull through a commercial data service region by region. A second pass searches maps by practice area (“family lawyer”, “estate lawyer” and so on, with French terms in Quebec) to catch firms the first pass missed.

Some firms have no website on their business listing. For those, an AI agent searches for the firm’s site, and a script only accepts a find if the phone number or address on the site matches the listing. Unclear cases go to a person to decide.

2. Reading the firm’s own website

Our crawler visits each firm’s public website and saves a limited set of pages: the home page, about and team pages, lawyer bios, and contact and office pages. It identifies itself as LawOnline’s directory bot. We keep an archived copy of every page it reads, so any fact in a listing can be traced back to the page it came from.

When a firm’s site blocks automated visitors, we may read an archived copy from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, or load the page in an ordinary browser. We never get around a CAPTCHA or a login.

A few details don’t come from the firm’s website: the Google rating and review count, business hours, and some listing attributes come from the firm’s public Google business listing.

3. AI drafts the record

An AI language model (currently from Anthropic’s Claude family) reads the saved pages and fills in a structured record: the firm’s name, offices, phone numbers and practice areas, and for each person their name, title, year of call, law school, languages and a short bio. Records the first model flags as weak are redone by a stronger model. The rules it works under include:

Only what the page supports. Every field has to come from the firm’s own text, or it stays empty. The model mustn’t guess a call year, a school or a title.
Titles are copied as written on the person’s own page.
Lawyers and staff are kept apart. Law clerks, paralegals, articling students, patent and trademark agents and consultants are listed under their real titles and never counted as lawyers.
No former or deceased people. Anyone described as retired, former or in memoriam is left out.
Year of call means the first Canadian call, and law school only comes from an education section, never from a menu or filter on the site.

4. Automated checks

AI makes mistakes, so we don’t take its word for it. A set of scripts (not AI) checks the records against the saved pages and our rules. Among other things, they:

confirm that every person’s name actually appears in the pages we read, and take a name off the listing if it only shows up inside a client’s review;
block changes to a practice area, law school, year of call, title or office that contradict the person’s own page;
stop someone who isn’t a lawyer from being published as one;
flag the same person appearing at two firms, and one firm published under several names;
stop a bio from describing a different person, from copying the firm’s own marketing text, or from stating a gender the source never states;
make sure nothing we’ve removed comes back in a later update;
hold back firms with no practising lawyers and no real description, and keep thin pages out of search engines.

Most of these checks run on every update and stop it from shipping if they fail. The rest run as regular sweeps across the whole directory.

5. Deeper profiles and independent verification

For a growing number of firms and lawyers we write a fuller profile, and these go through a stricter process:

Research. We read the firm’s whole website and a limited set of other public sources. We don’t use data brokers, other directories, review sites or social media, and lawyer profiles never draw on law society directories. Any outside fact has to be tied to the right person by more than a shared name.
Write with receipts. The AI writing the profile has to record each claim alongside a word-for-word quote from its source.
Independent check. A separate AI review, which didn’t write the profile, checks every claim against the quoted source and flags anything that isn’t supported.
Fix or hold back. Flagged claims get a targeted fix and are checked again. Anything that still can’t be supported is cut or the profile is held back. A profile can’t be published unless that independent check passed on its exact final text.

To be clear about the limits: most firm descriptions on the site were written by an earlier, lighter version of this process that didn’t include the independent check. We’re rewriting them under the stricter process, and until then they’re more likely to contain errors. Only a small share of lawyers have a full profile so far.

6. Human spot checks

We pull random samples of published profiles and check them by hand against the firm’s own website. These checks do find errors, such as an outdated title, a wrong practice area or call year, or a lawyer who has since left the firm. When they do, we correct those listings and add a rule or an automated check so the same kind of mistake gets caught everywhere, not just in the sample. Some of that clean-up work is still in progress.

7. Dates, regulators and freshness

Each listing says which month its data was gathered. Firms change, lawyers move and retire, and a listing reflects the firm’s website as it was then, not as it is today.

We don’t copy law society directories. Instead, every listing links to the regulator that can confirm a lawyer’s licence and standing (Law Society of Ontario, Law Society of British Columbia, Law Society of Alberta, Law Society of Saskatchewan, Law Society of Manitoba, Nova Scotia Barristers' Society, Law Society of New Brunswick, Law Society of Prince Edward Island, Law Society of Newfoundland and Labrador, Barreau du Québec, Law Society of Yukon, Law Society of the Northwest Territories, Law Society of Nunavut or Chambre des notaires du Québec). That official record always takes priority over anything shown here.

Accuracy and limits

We can’t guarantee that any listing is accurate. The information is gathered and written with the help of AI and refreshed periodically, so an entry may be incomplete, out of date or wrong, and that includes biographies, practice areas, titles, years of call and contact details. The firms and lawyers listed here don’t supply, review or approve their listings unless they’ve contacted us.

Nothing in this directory is a recommendation, an endorsement or legal advice, and a listing doesn’t imply any relationship between the firm and LawOnline.ca. Before you rely on anything here, confirm the details on the firm’s or lawyer’s own website and confirm their licence with their regulator.

What we don’t do

We don’t sell this data.
We don’t use it for marketing or outreach. We don’t contact the firms or lawyers listed here to solicit business, and we never add anyone in this directory to a mailing or sales list.
We don’t harvest email addresses for commercial messaging.

Corrections and removal

If you’re a listed lawyer or firm and something about you is wrong, or you’d like to be removed, use the Correct or remove this listing link on your profile, our submission form, or email directory@lawonline.ca.

Hidden right away. When you send a correction or removal request through the form, the listing is hidden from the directory immediately, before anyone has read your request.
Then fixed or removed. We correct the record or take it down, and the change is published with the next update. A removed listing is recorded so later updates can’t bring it back.
Firm removals are confirmed. So a rival can’t take a firm’s listing down for good, we confirm a firm’s removal through the contact details on its own website before it’s permanent.
Things you ask us not to show stay off your listing, even when we refresh the data.

We aim to review every request within 10 business days. The full process, along with the terms that apply to the Directory, is in our Directory Terms of Use.