Legal Research

Nimonik

By Simon Fodden

Nimonik is a Canadian outfit that offers to keep companies up to date on federal and provincial environmental regulations, as well as municipal bylaws for Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. The website provides updates on legislation and relevant rulings concerning a wide variety of industrial activities — e.g. air emissions, contaminated sites, emergency situations, fuel transfers, hazardous material management. Members of the site may comment on the material and have those comments restricted to their company’s account. There is the ability as well to integrate a corporate environmental management system register with Nimonik and have it kept up to date in this way.

Nimonik charges for this service, though a 30-day trial account is free.

My brief examination of Nimonik reveals that, although the idea is a sound one, there’s still some work for them to do to bring the site up to a proper level. For instance, the Home tab shows you links to the various updates to statutes etc. over a given period; clicking on a link takes you to a useful summary; but there it stops: there’s no further link to the actual ruling or legislative provision concerned — at least for the dozen or so items I pursued. You don’t have to be a lawyer (though it helps) to realize that a summary is only one possible interpretation of a law; and neither do you have to be a lawyer to read the legislation or judgment to improve your understanding.

To take another example of where Nimonik needs to improve: there’s no indication (I could find) of how up-to-date the material on the site actually is. It would help if, for instance, Nimonik declared that all regulatory changes as of ‘x’ number of days ago are included and accurate — which raises the further issue of whether the legislation reproduced on the site is the authoritative version or simply a jurisdiction’s web version (where there is a difference).

All in all it seems to me that Nimonik would benefit greatly from hiring a good law librarian.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 06, 2009 (boomark / email).