Canadian Court Document Downloader v2

Canadian court document retrieval, BOA builder, batch downloader, duplicate detector, and OCR extractor. ALWAYS trigger when user says: 'download this case', 'get me the PDF', 'pull the judgment', 'build my BOA from these cases', 'attach the cases', 'batch download', 'find duplicate cases', 'extract text from this PDF', or provides a list of citations and wants the actual documents. Also trigger for: 'check if I already have this case', 'organize my cases', 'export my authorities to CSV', 'missing authority report', or any request to retrieve, organize, or analyze Canadian court documents. Aliases: court-downloader, boa-downloader, case-retriever, batch-downloader.

Canadian Court Document Downloader v2

Full-featured Canadian court document retrieval, organization, and BOA assembly. Lawful access only. Not legal advice.

Scripts

skills/canadian-court-downloader/
  SKILL.md
  references/scc-item-ids.md
  scripts/court_engine.py
  scripts/cli.py
  outputs/   # manifests, cases/, audit.log

cd C:\Users\Dizzle\projects\bc-legal-ai\skills\canadian-court-downloader\scripts

python cli.py download --citation "2019 SCC 65" --out ..\outputs
python cli.py download --citation "2008 SCC 9" --citation "2011 SCC 61" --matter "test-boa" --out ..\outputs
python cli.py batch --file cases.json --out ..\outputs --matter "DEMO-JR-0001"
python cli.py ocr --pdf ..\outputs\cases\Tab_01_Vavilov_2019_SCC_65.pdf

cases.json example:

{
  "matter": "DEMO-JR-0001",
  "cases": [
    {"tab": 1, "citation": "2019 SCC 65", "name": "Vavilov", "proposition": "Reasonableness is the presumptive standard of review."},
    {"tab": 2, "citation": "2008 SCC 9", "name": "Dunsmuir"}
  ]
}

Compliance (non-negotiable)

Rule	Action
Public documents only	No auth bypass
No CAPTCHA / bot-wall defeat	Never
No sealed records	Stop if sealed
CanLII Cloudflare	Do not retry → REFERENCE_PDF + URL
Rate limit	≥ 0.5s between requests

Source ladder

SCC — decisions.scc-csc.ca …/{ITEM_ID}/{1|2|3}/document.do
BCCA/BCSC — try courts.gov.bc.ca; usually → reference PDF
FCA — try if item id known
CanLII — blocked → reference PDF only

Verified IDs: references/scc-item-ids.md (Knight/Kane/Lapointe IDs are provisional).

Status codes

ALREADY_EXISTS · SUCCESS · REFERENCE_PDF · BLOCKED_CLOUDFLARE · HTTP_400/403/404 · SMALL_FILE · NOT_PDF · DUPLICATE · VERSION_UPDATE · OCR_SUCCESS · OCR_UNAVAILABLE · UNKNOWN_COURT

Agent workflow

Parse single / list / BOA tabs / folder organize request.
Run cli.py or court_engine.download_batch — do not invent PDFs.
Default out: skills/canadian-court-downloader/outputs/.
After batch, open and summarize: manifest.json, table_of_authorities.csv, download_summary.txt, missing_authorities.txt, access_denied.txt, duplicates.txt.
Never call a REFERENCE_PDF the official judgment.
BOA assembly: use legal-file-assistant boa_assembler.py if merging SUCCESS PDFs; label working draft.
Statutes still via bc-legislation-admin / BC Laws — this skill is cases.
Local “do I already have it?” → also use legal-file-assistant file search.