Hugh Lawford, the law professor who invented and marketed Quicklaw, the online database that has revolutionized legal research and practice, died of complications from Parkinson's disease on Monday in Kingston General Hospital. He was 75.
Prof. Lawford, who was born in Edmonton on Sept. 8, 1933, graduated from the University of Alberta and then earned a bachelor of civil law at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. In 1958 he joined the nascent law faculty at Queen's University in Kingston, where he taught international and administrative law.
He realized as early as the mid-1960s that legal documents could be computerized and made widely available in an electronic database. With his academic colleague Richard von Briesen, he founded Quicklaw Inc. at Queen's in 1973. When funding dried up, the pair put their own money into building the concept into an essential legal tool.
By the time the company was sold to LexisNexis in 2002, it had more than 200 employees in more than a dozen offices in Canada and the United States. The Canadian Association of Law Librarians gave Prof. Lawford its award for excellence in legal publishing in 2000 and renamed the prize in his honour five years later. A full obituary will follow.
