What Is My Legal Topic and What Are My Rights?

Understanding your legal problem will help you find legal information that is specific to your situation. Once you define the problem and what you’d like the outcome to be, you can figure out what area of law applies to your situation and how to proceed.

One way to get started is to look for your topic on the website Clicklaw. You can look for your topic by using the search box, or by looking for your topic in the list of topics. Clicklaw will then point you to a list of resources that can help explain the proper legal terms for your topic and possible courses of action to solve the problem. You may want to search for more than one legal topic that concerns your situation.

Let’s say that you are looking for information on what rights you have as a tenant when you are being evicted. You can begin your search by:

• Entering a relevant keyword in the search box, like "eviction".
• You can look at the range of resources from this search:
  • Clicklaw common questions,
  • HelpMap services in or near your community, and
  • Online publications that discuss eviction.
• You might also want to look through all the resources listed under the topic “Your daily life - Housing, tenancy & neighbours” on the Clicklaw home page.

This information applies to British Columbia, Canada. Last reviewed for legal accuracy by Courthouse Libraries BC staff, October 2015.

Beginner's Guide to Finding Legal Information © Courthouse Libraries BC 2015 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada Licence.