Best Practices for the Use of Case Center (June 2023)

1. Uploading documents to Case Center is mandatory in all matters proceeding on Case Center. Exceptions may be made in cases where parties face extraordinary circumstances preventing them from accessing Case Center.
2. Parties should upload and test their documents as soon as practicable or at least seven days before the scheduled hearing to enable an effective use of the platform at the hearing.
3. Parties should not send their documents to the Hearing Office via email. Parties are also not required to provide paper copies of their materials unless specifically requested by the hearing panel and/or the Hearing Office.
4. The documents uploaded to Case Center are not considered to be “filed” pursuant to the Rules and do not form part of the hearing record unless specifically requested by the party and accepted by the Hearing Office for “filing” or marked as exhibits and entered into the record at the hearing.
5. The uploaded documents will not be available for the hearing panel’s review prior to the commencement of the hearing unless the party uploading the documents expressly requests that they be shared in advance. Uploading documents to Case Center is similar to submitting documents “for identification” purposes, some or all of which may be marked as exhibits into the record during the hearing.

Documents’ Format and Size

1. Documents can be uploaded in multiple formats, including Word (.doc), Excel (.xlsx), Adobe (.pdf), as well as emails, audio/video files and other forms of media.
2. To ensure documents are quickly processed by Case Center and accessible for review immediately after the upload, large documents (over 1,000 pages) should be split into smaller parts (500 pages or less). Each document should be no more than 2GB.

Uploading Documents

1. Parties are responsible for uploading their documents using the naming conventions found in the Appendix - Standardization.
2. Uploading documents and updating your case or documents is done in the “Update” work area. To access it, find your case on the “Case List” and select “Update Case”.
3. To upload documents, find your case on the “Case List” and select “Update Case”:
   • go to “Sections” at the top of the screen
   • select the appropriate sub-bundle, e.g., Respondent, Enforcement
   • click “Upload File(s)” next to the relevant section.
     You can click and drag documents into the box or click “Add Files” and select the files you want to upload.
4. Prior to uploading your documents, ensure you have selected the correct section and sub-bundle. If you have uploaded the wrong document, or uploaded your document in the wrong section, you can move it by going to “Section”, “Update All Documents” and choosing “Move”. This will allow you to select the appropriate section. Once moved, review the section to ensure the document was moved and it is properly numbered. This will ensure that all documents are organized and easily accessible during the hearing.
5. Each document will be automatically numbered and indexed in the table of contents created in Case Center and found on the left-hand of the “Review” screen. The index is based on the names of the files uploaded by the parties and, if needed, individual index entries can be modified and re-ordered after the files have been uploaded.
6. It is possible to maintain bookmarks created in PDF documents uploaded to Case Center. When uploading your PDF documents, use “Upload bookmarked PDF into a single section” instead of “Upload File(s)”. Selecting this feature will prompt Case Center to detect first-level bookmarks and split the PDF document into separate documents. These newly separated documents will be organized numerically in the table of contents. Any hyperlinks within these documents will remain intact. Documents should include only first-level bookmarks; do not use second-level bookmarks as that may prevent Case Center from properly reading the bookmarks and uploading the documents into appropriate sections.
7. Case Center’s numbering is applied once documents are uploaded to the system. This will automatically generate an index. Do not use tab numbers in the description of your bookmarks (e.g., Tab 1, Tab 2 etc.). If you choose to include tab numbers in the description of the bookmarks or have a cover and/or index page, you may need to re-number your documents manually after uploading to ensure that document numbers match your tab numbers (i.e., Tab 1 is indexed as #1, etc.). In this case, your cover and/or index pages can be numbered “00-C” and/or “00-I”.

Hyperlinks to Online Sources

1. Legal authorities can be hyperlinked, where possible, to public sources that allow free access to the documents (i.e., CIRO website, commissions’ and tribunals’ websites, courts’ websites, CanLII, e-Laws, etc.). Case Center recognizes and maintains all publicly available hyperlinks.

Hyperlinks to Other Documents

1. If your authorities or other documents are not available online, relevant excerpts and documents may be pre-uploaded to Case Center and hyperlinked to the main document using the platform (e.g., cases uploaded to the Book of Authorities can be hyperlinked to citations in the Written Submissions).
2. To create an internal hyperlink:
   • pre-upload the document you would like to hyperlink to Case Center (e.g., Book of Authorities)
   • open the document and scroll to the particular page or paragraph and click on “Copy Link” under “View”
   • insert the link into your main document (e.g., Written Submissions), which is not yet uploaded to Case Center
   • upload the main document to Case Center and test your links (note that hyperlinks may take some time to load).