The Civil Resolution Tribunal – How to Search CRT Decisions

0:00 – Why Search CRT Decisions

0:00 Eric Regehr: Eric Regehr, I'm the Vice Chair of strata disputes at the Civil Resolution Tribunal amongst other things, and I'm just going to do a brief presentation giving some advice about how and why to search CRT decisions. So first, just briefly, say why I think it's important. CRT decisions aren't binding precedents, which is a bit of legal jargon that just means that tribunal members are not legally required to agree with each other.

0:30 Basically we don't have to follow each other's decisions. But the reality is that CRT members pay close attention to each other's decisions when we make our own decisions. And while it's possible for us to disagree, and it does happen, you can find examples of cases where tribunal members have explicitly disagreed with another CRT case, it's pretty unusual. The vast majority of the time the law is pretty settled, or it's something that we agree about.

1:01 So CRT decisions are an important source of legal knowledge, and in particular strata legal knowledge. But I will say that CRT decisions are not a good place to start learning about a strata issue that you might be facing. CRT decisions are generally pretty narrowly focused on the issue at hand, the dispute between the parties that needs to be resolved, and they typically will only explain the law to the extent necessary to make that decision.

1:35 So one particular decision isn't generally going to say everything that needs to be said about an area of law, it's just going to be pretty tightly focused on the issues at hand. And so their best use is not to learn general legal principles, but to answer a very specific question about how to deal with something that you're facing. Why is it hard? I mean, people go to law school and spend 30 years as a lawyer and they still sometimes have a hard time researching cases.

2:05 Strata law is unique.

2:08 – Strata Case Law Before and After 2016

2:08 Eric Regehr: Before the CRT began deciding strata cases in 2016, the issue is that very few strata cases made it to court and made it all the way to the end. As some of you may know, getting through to the end of a BC Supreme Court trial is expensive, it's time consuming, it's extremely complicated, and oftentimes the face monetary value of strata legal issues isn't necessarily high enough to justify that investment in time and money.

2:38 And that meant that before 2016 there were maybe a few dozen court cases that somebody needed to know that were even out there. So the problem was that there just often wasn't a case that would deal with a particular issue. And now we have the opposite problem, because as of when I wrote this slide a few days ago there were 2,500 strata final decisions on our database, which is far, far too many to know off the top of your head, or to possibly keep track of.

3:10 – Tip One: Understanding the Decisions Database

3:10 Eric Regehr: And that means you need to be able to use the search tools available, to not spend your entire life just reading case after case after case. So I'm going to organize this into three tips. Tip number one is just understanding the database and how it works. For better or worse, the CRT decisions database is not Google. Google, you can just dump a bunch of words into the search bar and its algorithm will sort out what it thinks you're trying to say and find you relevant pages.

3:41 But there is no algorithm under the hood here, you need to know how to use the search terms. So I'm just going to open up here's our website, just going to show what I mean here. Here's our decisions page. First thing I recommend is just don't start searching here, because it will search all of our cases and all of our different jurisdiction areas. If you go into advanced search you can start by just narrowing at the outset your search to strata property decisions.

4:14 And I also suggest narrowing it to final decisions, just because those other three — defaults, liability is assumed so they're not going to say anything interesting, summary and preliminary decisions tend to be about procedural stuff, which might be relevant but for the most part you're probably just going to want to look at final decisions.

4:32 – Search Syntax: Exact Phrases and Connectors

4:34 Eric Regehr: And then the big skill that you need is being able to use what that box calls the syntax of searching. And these aren't unique to the CRT, you'll see this kind of all over the place in terms of searching databases, but because of the number of cases it's extremely important to be conversant in them and to be able to use them. So I'll go through a few of them.

4:58 Some of them are pretty self-explanatory. One big difference is the difference between using the quotation marks and the exact command, and that's because using the quotation marks, or generally searching a word, it will search for variations on the word, like grammatically similar ones. So for example, if you search for significant unfairness, everyone's favourite strata catchphrase, with quotation marks — maybe I should zoom in on this a bit, I think that's something Ryan said to me the other day — you'll see that it not only finds significant unfairness, but it finds significantly unfairly, significantly unfair, significant unfairness.

5:36 So the various grammatical ways that that phrase can exist, it searches all of them. Whereas if you use the exact command, like this, oops, it will only find the exact phrase significant unfairness, and will ignore the other ways that that phrase can be searched. Oops. The and, and or, are pretty self-explanatory. Or is an extremely important one, because there are often multiple ways to say the same thing, which I'll get into later.

6:18 But for example, there are commonly issues in stratas about what happens on somebody's patio, but sometimes people say patio, sometimes people say balcony, sometimes people say deck. And so using that or means you can just hive off any one of those terms and make sure you're not missing a relevant decision. And then the /p, /s and /n are just different ways to constrain a linkage between two words.

6:46 So if you do the /p, that's looking for terms in the same paragraph. /s, looking for them in the same sentence. /n, you're just meant to put a number in there, so if you put /5 it will find word number one within five words of word number two, which is a function I frankly never ever use.

6:58 – Using Brackets to Nest Searches

7:09 Eric Regehr: Maybe the most important piece of syntax isn't in this grey box for some reason, which is the use of brackets, which just operates in the same way that brackets operate in grade eight math, where they just kind of create nesting, searches within searches, which is a really important tool.

7:32 So just to illustrate that, if you had a situation where there was a complaint in your strata about parking allocations, which is not uncommon as I'm sure you can imagine, you might think, okay, there's a significant unfairness issue here and it's about the exclusive use of a parking spot, so I'm going to search significantly unfair, exclusive use and parking. So this will just say, look for a case with all three of those terms in it somewhere.

8:00 – Worked Example: Parking and Significant Unfairness

8:05 Eric Regehr: That yields 74 results, which is frankly too many to read through. I usually try to aim for between 10 and 30, I think, is a useful number. If you just use something like the same sentence connectors for those sorts of terms, you'll probably usually find that it's too narrow, you get zero results or too few results to be useful.

8:30 The way I would look for this sort of issue is I would say, okay, the idea of exclusive use and parking lot or parking stall or parking spot, it's important that those are in the same sentence, but I really just need this decision to mention significant unfairness somewhere. So that's probably how I would start looking for this issue: the decision has to say significantly unfair somewhere, and somewhere else it has to have a sentence with both the phrase exclusive use and parking.

9:00 And I know, because I tested this in advance, that that yields a very useful 30 results, which is I think a reasonable number to look through. Now, the way these are sorted is quote unquote by relevance. That's the word we use here. Really all they mean by relevance is the sheer number of times your terms appear. So it's a rough proxy for relevance, but it's certainly not perfect, and you can't be sure that, you know, sometimes a top decision is just the longest one rather than the most relevant.

9:23 – Relevance Sorting, Highlights and Issue Statements

9:32 Eric Regehr: So the site's features are pretty helpful in terms of narrowing it down, so you don't have to read every word of these decisions. As you can see right within the search results, it shows a few highlights of when your search terms came up, in bold, so you get a few sentences, and sometimes that gives you enough of a flavour to at least rule out certain cases, if not rule them in.

9:56 Once you go into a case — I'll just pick one at random here — the website allows you to toggle through as much or as few of the search terms as you want. So you can say, well, I don't need to know every time it says significant unfairness, I see it only mentions these words twice, which is one each, and I can toggle down and see where that was and kind of explore the surrounding context.

10:20 The other thing that I recommend using, which is not part of the website itself but it's just a CRT writing convention, is skipping down to the issues statement. Every CRT decision has issue statements, usually framed as simple questions. And rather than the introduction or the body of the decision, this is usually where you can get right down to what the case is about and what questions the tribunal member is going to answer.

10:50 This one, you can see we've got a question about whether this particular strata's parking assignment process complied with the Strata Property Act, and whether that process was significantly unfair. So based on the way I framed my question before, you can think, well, this is probably a case that warrants my further attention and I'm actually going to go through and read it in more detail to see if it answers my questions.

11:20 Oh, noteworthy decisions. This is just a bit of a confession on my part. You'll see in the advanced search terms that there's an ability to select only noteworthy decisions. That was something that we were doing consistently for a while, to try to create a smaller database within the database, of cases that answer important questions.

11:49 – Noteworthy Decisions and CanLII Note-Ups

11:49 Eric Regehr: I've been the strata Vice Chair for a little over a year and I have not done that at all. We have a summer law student who's going to help me update that database so that this function is useful. Today it's incomplete, but by the end of the summer that'll be another really easy way to, instead of search through 2,000 cases, to search through maybe 100 or 150 that hit the high points of the most common strata issues, and hopefully make searching the database easier.

12:18 The last thing I'll point out is, the same underlying technology exists on something called CanLII. CanLII is a free database of every legal decision, both court and various tribunals, all over Canada. So every Civil Resolution Tribunal case is on there just the same. All of the features are mostly the same. The CRT database has some definite advantages, but the one thing that CanLII can do that the CRT database can't is what lawyers call note up cases, which is just a way to say, okay, found myself a case on the CRT database.

13:02 I'm just going to take an example that I know gets cited a lot, of Rintoul. Maybe you read Rintoul and thought, this is pretty good stuff, I wonder how other cases have dealt with it. If you go into CanLII and find your case and click on treatment, this shows you a list of every other case that has mentioned Rintoul. So if there's a legal principle in Rintoul and you're wondering if maybe it's been applied in a different set of facts, in a different circumstance, this is a way to go through and look at all of the times a different tribunal member has mentioned it.

13:38 And so that can be a useful advantage of CanLII. But generally I would recommend sticking to the decisions database on the CRT, because it's a little bit easier to search. Tip number two, and I kind of alluded to it earlier, is to learn the basics first. Use general secondary sources to learn what the Strata Property Act says about your situation, or what other legal doctrines might apply.

14:08 CRT decisions, yeah, they're just too specific to really help. The Solution Explorer is a much better first place to go. It has some really good high level information, and I know that a different person at the CRT presented on the Solution Explorer last year at this conference, and that presentation is on YouTube, so you can look at that. UBC students publish what they call the LSLAP manual, which you can just Google.

14:36 It's got an entire chapter on strata law, which doesn't cover everything but it's pretty comprehensive.

14:38 – Tip Two: Secondary Sources and ChatGPT Limits

14:43 Eric Regehr: It's a few dozen pages and written in fairly plain language. And then, the other thing we always talk about, Dr Google, there's also Google JD. Plugging in some search terms into Google about your legal issue will probably point you to some blog posts or other articles on strata law firm websites, which can be a really helpful first place to go in terms of explaining the law. For the curious, I have explored ChatGPT and its ability to accurately summarize the law, and it's just not there yet for this type of application.

15:21 I've tried to research a few strata law issues about which I know what the answer is, and the answers that ChatGPT gave me were unhelpfully vague and at times completely wrong. So that technology is obviously evolving fast and it's, I'm sure, in short order going to be useful in the legal research world, but as of right now it's not. So tip number three is, after you've figured out the general lay of the land and understand what Strata Property Act section applies, is to use the lingo and to be specific.

16:06 One difficulty with searching CRT cases is that our plain language mandate means that we don't quote legislation very often, we don't quote court cases very often. We try to paraphrase those things in a plain language way, which can be great as a reader but harder as a researcher, because there's just a million ways to paraphrase things, no one way. So, just by way of example, if you're looking to find cases about imposing fines, which is the language that the Strata Property Act uses, and you search impose fine — oops — you're going to get 287 results, which is a lot.

16:43 – Tip Three: Search the Act's Lingo

16:59 Eric Regehr: But then you might start thinking to yourself, like, well, that's not the only verb that you can use to talk about fining somebody. First of all, fine can be the noun or a verb. You can just say the strata fined the person. Well, fine also can mean other things, so just searching for the word fine isn't going to get you anywhere. You can also issue a fine, which I don't love but 48 people have done it.

17:23 You could levy a fine, which I like even less, but 73 people said that. So you can see that trying to wordsmith it can be very challenging, to make sure that you're capturing everything. You could try to take a step back and talk about bylaw enforcement. There you've got 244 results, and now you can kind of see, like, oh, I must not be capturing everything, because there were 290 cases that talked about imposing fines.

17:53 And so what I always do is, usually in strata law there is a Strata Property Act section that applies. And while the CRT very rarely will quote the body of a section of legislation, it almost always will mention it if it applies.

18:06 – Finding Cases by Section Number

18:16 Eric Regehr: So I know that the section of the Strata Property Act about bylaw enforcement processes is section 135. We don't use s., which you'll see in court cases, we just say section whatever. I will just search section 135 as the term I'm searching, and I can be very confident that every CRT case that talks about bylaw enforcement process will include the term section 135. And from there, now that I've got the whole universe of cases about that Strata Property Act provision, I'll use the and connector and brackets to try to focus on my specific issue.

18:59 So, whoops, if I was trying to learn about how big of a deal it is that there was an error in a bylaw contravention warning letter, like the strata cited the wrong bylaw, I might say, okay, well that's an enforcement process issue, so I know section 135 is going to be in there. And that's where you start to be creative, at this point where you start to think, okay, what are the various ways somebody could talk about a strata citing the wrong bylaw?

19:30 Well, obviously wrong bylaw, but somebody could also say they didn't cite the right bylaw. And then there's just synonyms to those things. I would probably search correct bylaw — oops, those shouldn't be /s's, those should be ors — or incorrect bylaw, and then close the brackets. And what that will search is every case with the term section 135 in it, and if it says any of wrong bylaw, right bylaw, correct bylaw or incorrect bylaw, it'll come up.

20:08 I've only got 16 results, and I know because I tried this earlier that you can even see just from these bold summaries that these cases are right bang on what I'm wanting to learn about.

20:11 – Section 71 and Gazebo Alteration Cases

20:21 Eric Regehr: In this one the tribunal member said that none of the strata's warning letters cited the correct bylaw, so that tribunal member found in that situation that the strata hadn't complied with section 135. So I would know, like, okay, I need to click through, see what exactly that letter said, see what was wrong with it, and see if that same reasoning would apply to my situation. Another example that we commonly see is about section 71.

20:47 That's the section that says that the strata can't significantly alter common property without a three-quarters vote at a general meeting. And a common way that comes up is owners putting things on common property that the strata or other residents don't like. So for example, like a gazebo type structure, we see a fair number of those. If I just search section 71 there's 222 cases, which is way too many.

21:25 But if I search for section 71 and gazebo, or any of the other gazebo like structures I can think of, like a pergola, privacy screen — oops, must have done a typo because I did that /s again — all right, I've got 20 decisions where the tribunal considered pergolas or gazebos or privacy screens and section 71, which is a reasonable number to go through to see what sorts of things were considered significant and which ones weren't.

22:06 So yeah, there's kind of a structure to it, but then at the end of the day you do have to use the other side of your brain and be creative about how to search for things, and what various ways there are to say things. And that's it.

22:26 Ryan Grant: Awesome, thanks, that was great. And looks like your camera stopped working partway through, and then I just made the screen full screen, which was good because people could see it very clearly then.

22:42 Eric Regehr: Well, here I am again. Thanks everyone for paying attention, and enjoy the rest of the conference.

22:46 Ryan Grant: Thank you so much, have a good rest of your day, Eric.

22:49 Eric Regehr: Bye.