Teaching Legal Research to Diverse Audiences: Practical Strategies and Sustainable Approaches

By Alan Kilpatrick

On Tuesday, May 26, 2026, I am co-presenting a session at the 2026 Canadian Association of Law Libraries Conference with Brenda Alm (Manager, Partnerships and Content, CanLII) and Jennifer Walker (Head librarian, County of Carleton Law Association):  

Teaching Legal Research to Diverse Audiences: Practical Strategies and Sustainable Approaches
1:15 pm – 2:30 pm
Ballroom AB, Delta Beausejour Moncton

Free legal research resources play an increasingly important role across the legal information landscape. Self-represented litigants rely on them exclusively, small firms balance costs against research needs, and organizations of all sizes reassess their subscription models. This creates new teaching challenges for legal information professionals serving diverse user populations.

This panel brings together practitioners from law society, law association, and open-access contexts to explore practical teaching strategies using CanLII as a common framework for discussion. The session uses three real-world teaching scenarios as discussion prompts, allowing panelists to demonstrate how different institutional contexts and user populations shape their instructional approaches.

We’ll address key challenges such as adapting instruction for audiences with vastly different research backgrounds and needs, creating reusable teaching materials that scale across contexts while remaining accessible, and navigating common teaching tensions like comprehensive versus focused instruction and synchronous versus asynchronous delivery.

Panelists will share practical strategies for addressing misconceptions users encounter, building sustainable teaching programs with limited time, and helping users develop critical research skills. Because CanLII is widely used across all our contexts, it serves as the practical example for exploring these broader teaching challenges. Attendees will leave with adaptable strategies and frameworks applicable to their own teaching contexts.