Trade Agreement: WTO-AGP/NAFTA/AIT/Canada FTAs with
Peru/Colombia/Panama
Tendering Procedures:
Attachment: None
Non-Competitive Procurement Strategy: Exclusive Rights
Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement: No
Vendor Name and Address:
Lexum informatique juridique inc.
910-4200 boul. Saint-Laurent
Montreal Quebec
Canada
H2W2R2
Nature of Requirements:
Please Note, for any additional information regarding this ACAN
or to obtain copy of the criteria for assessment of the
statement of capabilities, Please contact the following
Contracting Authority:
Jonathan Vinet
819-956-2940
J••••••••@••••••••.••.ca
AUTOMATED LEGAL INFORMATION EXTRACTION SYSTEM
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.
DEFINITION OF REQUIREMENTS
The Office of the Chief Military Judge requires commercial off-
the- shelf software that allows the self- publishing of its
legal decisions and other related documents on its website. The
required software provides user friendly web-based
administrative interface for DND staff to login, submit
documents for online publishing and interacts with its decision
website. The publication of a particular document on the website
is immediate and documents are displayed in PDF and HTML
formats. The administrative interface has flexible metadata
fields that allow insertion of decision type, decision date,
style of cause, neutral citation, etc. Browsing of legal
decisions by collection, date and case name are provided, as
well as a full text search engine providing advanced features
such as stemming, auto-fill for exact match, auto-correction of
queries, generation of search snippets and highlighting of
search keywords in the body of search results. The software
must meet the standards in the fields in accordance with The
Preparation, Citation, and Distribution of Canadian Decisions
guide, which was adopted by the Canadian Judicial Council. The
software must also be Accessible and meet the WCAG-2 standard as
required by the Treasury Board of Canada.
CRITERIA FOR ASSESSMENT OF THE STATEMENT OF CAPABILITIES
Any interested supplier must demonstrate by way of a statement
of capabilities that their product and services meet the
following requirements:
ESSENTIAL SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS:
M1 The software proposed to meet this requirement must be
"off-the-shelf", meaning that each component of software is
commercially available and requires no further research and
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 experimental environment).
M2 The software must work and interoperate with the existing
website of the Office of the Chief Military Judge website which
is available at: http://www.jmc-cmj.forces.gc.ca. Transition
from the homepage to the decision portion of the website has to
be seamless from a user's perspective.
M3 The software must deliver, enable and support for users to
immediately publish legal decisions and other related documents
in both HTML and PDF (the two formats being identical in
content) from original files available in Microsoft Word, Word
Perfect, HTML and PDF formats.
M4 The software must deliver, enable and support the
functionality for users to do at a minimum the following 3 modes
of self-publishing of legal decisions and other related
documents:
1. Manually via secured web-based management interfaces;
2. Via a parsing engine for automatic metadata extraction from
the original document; and,
3. Via a web service In API for automated data entry from
another database.
M5 The software must deliver enable and support the
functionality for users to specify a flexible set of metadata
for each legal decision published, including but not limited to:
1. Date;
2. Case name;
3. Neutral citation;
4. Report citation;
5. Other citations;
6. File no. (docket);
7. Decision makers;
8. Representatives;
9. Parties;
10. Subject;
11. Decision type; and,
12. Decision status.
M6 The software must deliver, enable and support the
functionality for users to include all metadata values in a
headnote to be displayed at the top of the corresponding
decision
M7 The software must deliver, enable and support the
functionality for users to include separate editing sections for
legal decisions headnotes:
1. Case Summary;
2. Notes;
3. Internal Notes.
M8 The software must deliver, enable and support the
functionality for users to generates two separate sections on
the Office of the Chief Military Judge website in order to do
the following:
1. For the publishing of legal decisions; and
2. For the publishing of other types of documents such as
Bulletins, Press Releases, the Act or any other resource
documents.
M9 The software must deliver, enable and support the
functionality for users to create public webpages allowing the
browsing, and display of legal decisions by the following:
1. Collection;
2. Subject;
3. Date;
4. Case Name; and,
5. Neutral citation.
M10 The software must deliver, enable and support a full text
search engine indexing all published documents. A contextual
search box must be included on all browsing pages of the
website. The search engine must include the following features
as a minimum:
1. An advanced search page allowing to simultaneously undertake
full text and field queries (all metadata fields in use are
searchable);
2. Support for boolean, wild card and proximity operators;
3. Stemming of search queries in order to locate closely related
keywords;
4. Auto-fill feature providing quick links to search results
corresponding exactly to the query terms being inputted;
5. Auto-correction of spelling or grammatical errors in search
queries by proposing alternative queries;
6. Sorting of search results by relevance or by date;
7. Generation of search snippets, or short abstracts of each
document including the most relevant sentences for each results;
8. Key words in context highlighted in bold in the search
snippets; and
9. Key words in context highlighted in color in the HTML version
of search results and the capacity to activate/inactivate each
of them, as well as the capacity to browse among them.
M11 The software must deliver, enable and support the
functionality for users to insert hyperlinks within the
headnotes of legal decisions pointing to web documents.
M12 The software must deliver, enable and support the
functionality for users to link legal decisions published on the
Office of the Chief Military Judge website. The resulting links
must be qualified and bilateral: insertion of a "Appeal
Decision" link from Decision A to Decision B generates a "First
Instance Decision" link from Decision B to Decision A.
M13 The software must deliver, enable and support the
functionality for users to block the online indexing of legal
decisions by web bots such as the Google Bot (Robots.txt file
management).
M14 The software must deliver, enable and support web metrics
solution in order for users to monitor and report on the usage
of the decision portion of its website. The metrics must
include and but not limited to the following:
1. type and origin of visits for various time frame;
2. pages and files accessed;
3. time span of visits;
4. point of entry to and point of departure from the website.
M15 The software must meet the standards of The Preparation,
Citation, and Distribution of Canadian Decisions guide, which
was adopted by the Canadian Judicial Council which is available
online at
http://www.cjc-ccm.gc.ca/cmslib/Committee/JTAC/JTAC-C…
-of-Standards-2009-04-02-E.pdf.
M16 The software is accessible and is compliant to the WCAG-2
standard as required by the Treasury Board of Canada which is
available online at
http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx?id=23601.
M17 The software must deliver, enable and support a web service
Out API for the automatic feed of documents to third party
databases such as the CanLII (The Canadian Legal Information
Institute) website available at https://www.canlii.org and other
online re-publishers of Canadian legal information.
M18 The software must deliver, enable, support and integrate
awareness services such as an email notification list and RSS
feeds in order for users to subscribe, unsubscribe and receive
updates when new legal decisions are published on the Office of
the Chief Military Judge website.
M19 The software must deliver, enable and support the
functionality for processing documents written in Canadian
English and Canadian French and must recognize Canadian French
characters.
M20 The software must deliver, enable and support the
functionality to generates bilingual websites in Canadian
English and Canadian French, which includes:
1. The software must contain an ever-present toggle on every
screen to allow the users the functionality to switch their
Language of Preference. When the toggle is clicked the present
screen must refresh in the newly selected language;
2. All Screen Content, administrator and User consoles, Error
Messaging and Scripting must appear in the selected language
until such time as the Users click on the toggle to alter the
language again or such time as they sign out.
3. Upon subsequent sign-in, the Language of Preference selected
from their Account must be observed.
M21 The software must deliver, enable and support system
administration interface to be available in Canadian English and
Canadian French and each user can define its preference within
its user account.
M22 The software must be configurable in order to allow users to
process new sources of documents and metadata to be retrieved
and processed and relabeling of existing fields. Any adjustments
to the data structure or the metadata set must be completed at
the editorial level, without requiring additional software
programming or external programming support.
ESSENTIAL SUPPLIER REQUIREMENTS:
M23 The supplier must have at least 5 years of verifiable
expertise in processing complex legal documents, more
specifically in publishing documents online such as judgments,
factums, various motions, affidavits, etc. The supplier must be
able to demonstrate in depth knowledge of Canadian standards for
the citation and preparation of legal decisions.
M24 The supplier must be able to provide technical support in
both English and French by telephone and email, from Monday to
Friday.
M25 The supplier must be able to provide software updates to
support the development of the various electronic formats.
M26 Call Centre Services must be provided in both Official
Languages of Canada. The supplier must be able to provide
training in both English and French to the system administrator.
M27 The supplier must be able to offer additional editorial
services in order to support the Office of the Chief Military
Judge when needed. Such services may include the publishing of
documents by the supplier (including filling metadata values) or
the scanning and processing of paper-based historical legal
decisions.
M28 The Supplier must be able to import and publish the
historical archives into the new software with minimum
assistance from the personnel of the Office of the Chief
Military Judge.
M29 The supplier must be able to host the software in Canada and
guarantee an uptime of 99.5 % minimum with access to the servers
via HTTP and SSL protocols and daily backups.
APPLICABILITY OF THE TRADE AGREEMENT(S) TO THE PROCUREMENT
This procurement is subject to the following trade agreement(s):
a. Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT);
b. North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
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.
GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS REGULATIONS EXCEPTION(S)
Section 6.d of the Government Contract Regulations is being
invoked in this procurement as only one person or firm is
capable of performing the contract.
EXCLUSION AND/OR LIMITED TENDERING REASONS
Annex 4.4 article 506.12(b) of the AIT is applicable on the
basis of limited tendering where there is an absence of
competition for technical reasons and the goods or services can
be supplied only by a particular supplier and no alternative or
substitute exists, respectively.
Article 1016.2(b) of NAFTA is applicable on the basis of limited
tendering due to reasons where, for works of art, or for reasons
connected with the protection of patents, copyrights or other
exclusive rights, or proprietary information or where there is
an absence of competition for technical reasons, the goods or
services can be supplied only by a particular supplier and no
reasonable alternative or substitute exists.
OWNERSHIP OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Ownership of any Foreground Intellectual Property arising out of
the proposed contract will vest in the Contractor.
PERIOD OF THE PROPOSED CONTRACT AND DELIVERY DATE(S)
The proposed contract is for a period of 3 year, plus 2 one-year
irrevocable options. All deliverables mentioned in the
requirement must be delivered within 10 days of Contract award.
NAME AND ADDRESS OF THE PRE-IDENTIFIED SUPPLIER:
Lexum informatique juridique inc.
910-4200 boul. Saint-Laurent
Montreal, Quebec
H2W 2R2
Canada
SUPPLIER'S RIGHT TO SUBMIT A STATEMENT OF CAPABILITIES
Suppliers who consider themselves fully qualified and available
to provide the goods, services or construction 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 Contractor 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
INQUIRIES AND SUBMISSION OF STATEMENT OF CAPABILITIES
Inquiries and statements of capabilities are to be directed to:
Jonathan Vinet
819.956.2940
J••••••••@•••••.••.ca
Delivery Date: Above-mentioned
You are hereby notified that the government intends to negotiate
with one firm only as identified above. Should you have any
questions concerning this requirement, contact the contracting
officer identified above.
An Advance Contract Award Notice (ACAN) allows departments and
agencies to post a notice, for no less than fifteen (15)
calendar days, indicating to the supplier community that it
intends to award a good, service or construction contract to a
pre-identified contractor. If no other supplier submits, on or
before the closing date, a Statement of Capabilities that meets
the requirements set out in the ACAN, the contracting authority
may then proceed with the award. However, should a Statement of
Capabilities be found to meet the requirements set out in the
ACAN, then the contracting authority will proceed to a full
tendering process.
Suppliers who consider themselves fully qualified and available
to provide the services/goods described herein, 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 PWGSC file number, the contracting officer's name and the
closing date of the ACAN must appear on the outside of the
envelope in block letters or, in the case of a facsimile
transmission, on the covering page.
The Crown retains the right to negotiate with suppliers on any
procurement.
Documents may be submitted in either official language of Canada.
