Publishing Court Decisions Online

ACAN - Publishing Court Decisions Online – 5X001-25-0042

Tender Notice

Status - Active,

Dates

Publication date: March 3, 2025

Amendment date-None

Date closing: March 18, 2025

Details

Reference number:

Solicitation number: 5X001-25-0042

Region of opportunity: Canada

Region of delivery: NCR

Notice type: Advance Contract Award Notice (ACAN)

GSIN

•        T014QB: Electronic Publishing

•        D301A: Computer and Data Processing Services

•        N7030: ADP Software

Trade agreements – This requirement is exempt from all trade agreements based on the proprietary rights of the Contractor

Tendering procedure -ACAN

Procurement entity -Courts Administration Service

End user entity - Courts Administration Service

Contact person:

Contact Information: Marco Pelchat

Email: Procurement.Approvisionnement@cas-satj.gc.ca

Phone: 613-315-7390

Address: 90 Sparks Street, Ottawa, On, K1A 0H9, CA

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. Definition of Requirements

The Courts Administration Service (CAS) requires a commercial off- the- shelf software that allows the self-publishing of past and future reasons and judgments (herein referred to as “decisions”) of the four following courts (herein referred to as “the Courts”): the Federal Court of Appeal, the Federal Court, the Court Martial Appeal Court of Canada and the Tax Court of Canada. The supplier will also host said decisions on its servers.

3. Objectives:

CAS was established on July 2, 2003 by the Courts Administration Service Act, S.C. 2002, c. 8. The role of the Courts Administration Service (CAS) is to provide administrative services to four courts of law: the Federal Court of Appeal (FCA), the Federal Court (FC), the Court Martial Appeal Court of Canada (CMAC) and the Tax Court of Canada (TCC). These services permit individuals, companies, organizations and the Government of Canada to submit disputes and other matters to the courts, and enable the courts to hear and resolve the cases before them fairly, without delay and as efficiently as possible.

CAS publishes between 1 and 60 reasons and judgements in both official languages daily, for a total between 5,000 to 7,000 annually.

4. Requirements:

•        Hosting of existing and future reasons and judgements (herein referred to as “decisions”) of each of the four courts on a secure server;

•        Four different web pages, one for each of the four Courts, each to be available in both English and French;

•        Publishing Court decisions on the Internet;

•        Editing decisions using metadata to ensure published decisions follow the Courts’ standards and to facilitate the retrieval of these decisions by the search engine;

•        Providing a solid administrative tool in both English and French to delegated CAS staff

•        Making available a sophisticated search tool (in English and in French) on each of the Courts’ websites

•        For each of the Courts, creating a daily mailing list available by subscription

5. Location of work:

Contractor must host all services on its own secure server located in Canada. Help Desk Service will be offered during normal office hours. Contractor must be available to meet with a Project Coordinator and Manager at CAS location if required.

6. Language of Work:

•        The training, reference materials and training manuals must be available in both official languages.

•        The Platform must be available in both official languages with a toggle button.

•        Helpdesk service must be available in both official languages.

7. Criteria for Assessment

Any interested bidder 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 bidder 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 websites of the Courts. Transition from each of the four Courts’ homepages to the decision portion of the website has to be seamless from a user's perspective.

R.4

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.5

The software must enable designated CAS staff to immediately self-publish Court decisions in both HTML and PDF (the two formats being identical in content) from original files available in Microsoft Word and WordPerfect.

R.6

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

R.7

All the decisions, past and future, for each of the Courts must be hosted on a “Protected B” secure server located in Canada.

R.8

The bidder must create and host a “decision site” for each Court (see links at the end of this document). The look and feel of each Court must be reproduced in the new environment (logo, coat of arms, colours, etc.). Each of the four Courts already has a “main site”, hosted by CAS. Please refer to links at the end of this document.

R.9

All decisions, including revised decisions, translations, etc., must be available in both HTML and PDF; the supplier will be responsible for converting documents (created in .doc or .docx) uploaded by CAS through the Administrative Tool into these formats.

R.10

Decisions created by CAS must be uploaded to the supplier’s servers using the Administrative Tool. The software will use scripts to convert the MS Word coding into metadata, which will be used by each of the sites’ search engines to retrieve the decisions.

R.11

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

•        Title of decision

•        Neutral citation number

•        Date of decision

•        Docket number

•        Related docket number

•        Name of the Judge

•        Name of the Counsel

•        Names of the Parties

•        Date of publishing

•        Date of corrections and/or amendment of a previously published decision

R.12

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

R.13

A search engine, in both English and in French, will be included for each court. The software will index each court’s published decisions 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).

R.14

The software must offer, for each of the Courts, the possibility for users to subscribe or unsubscribe to an email notification and a RSS. These notifications will announce the new decisions, translations and corrections that are published on the website. For each Court, CAS will be able to establish rules governing which type of decisions should be included in these lists.

R.15

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

R.16

The bidder must be able to provide technical support in both English and French by telephone and email, from Monday to Friday

R.17

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

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. Contract Period

The contract period will for one (1) year from Contract award from April 1, 2025 to March 31, 2026 with four (4) additional one year periods under the same conditions.

13. Estimated Cost

The estimated value of the contract for one (1) year is $ 104,627.60 (GST/HST extra).

The estimated total maximum value of the contract (including options years) is $ 555,482.14 CAD inclusive of tax.

14. Name and Address of the Proposed Contractor:

Lexum

910-4200 boul. Saint-Laurent,

Montreal, (Quebec), H2W 2R2, Canada

15. Justification for Pre-identified Supplier’s right to submit a statement of capabilities

Suppliers who consider themselves fully qualified and available to provide the 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 and time for a submission of a statement of capabilities

The closing date and time for accepting statements of capabilities is March 18, 2025

17. Inquiries and Submission of Statement of Capabilities

Marco Pelchat

Procurement Consultant

Contracting and Materiel Management | Service contractuel et gestion du matériel

Courts Administration Service | Service administratif des tribunaux judiciaires

90 Sparks St./90 rue Sparks,

Ottawa ON K1A 0H9
Procurement.Approvisionnement@cas-satj.gc.ca

18. Definitions and links for the Courts

Federal Court of Appeal: https://www.fca-caf.ca/en/home

Federal Court: https://www.fct-cf.gc.ca/en/home

Court Martial Appeal Court: https://www.cmac-cacm.ca/en/home

Tax Court of Canada: https://www.tcc-cci.gc.ca/en/home

Web Standards for the Government of Canada: https://www.tbs-sct.canada.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx?id=24227

Access and terms of use

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A contracting officer can use limited tendering for specific reasons outlined in the applicable trade agreements. The reason for this contract is described below:

• None