Definitions and Symbols

Please refer to the following definitions to aid in the navigation of this report:

Definitions:

Legal Service Type: There are four legal service types offered by the Department of Justice Canada:

  1. Legal Advisory Services: Includes providing legal opinions and risk analyses, identifying appropriate dispute prevention and resolution processes; preparing and reviewing legal documents, signalling legal trends and developments; supporting contract and treaty negotiations; supporting policy development, including throughout the legislative process; and, providing legal training and seminars to departmental or agency officers and employees.
  2. Litigation Services: Services regarding anticipated or ongoing legal proceedings before any court level and before administrative and inquiry bodies, domestically and internationally, involving the Government of Canada. This includes for example, witness preparation, drafting and submitting pleadings and representing the federal government at hearings and trials.
  3. Legislative Drafting Services: Support for drafting government bills and motions to amend bills before Parliament, in accordance with government priorities and with a view to creating text that is legally defensible and workable.
  4. Regulatory Drafting Services: Includes drafting and examination of regulations and statutory instruments in accordance with applicable laws and established drafting conventions; providing regulatory policy advice, including advice on optimal tools to implement policy and program objectives; legal opinions and risk analysis on regulatory proposals; as well as providing legal training pertaining to the regulatory process.

Element: The term “element” refers to the individual questions of the Client Feedback Survey (CFS) questionnaire.

Service Dimension: A service dimension is a client satisfaction criterion and is a collection of elements that share a similar focus. There are three service dimensions:

  1. Responsiveness of legal services;
  2. Timeliness of legal services; and
  3. Usefulness of legal services.

Satisfaction Rating/Rating: The average (mean) rating calculated for a given element (on a 10-point scale, with 1 being “not at all satisfied” and 10 being “completely satisfied”).

Composite Rating: The average (mean) rating for a particular element or group of elements calculated across all four legal service types, where applicable.

Symbols:

* Denotes a high margin of error which can result from an insufficient number of responses and/or high variability between users’ responses. For this reason, ratings with margins of error exceeding 0.4 are considered to be less reliable and to have limited potential for analysis. Margins of error that fit this description are indicated by an asterisk.

† Denotes a statistically significant difference in ratings between categories. A statistically significant difference indicates that the difference observed between two ratings is unlikely to have occurred by chance alone.

n/a Indicates that the element was not included as part of the survey at the time.

Interpreting Results:

The Department has identified a performance target of 8.0 on a 10-point scale for each of the satisfaction elements for which client feedback was sought. These thresholds align with departmental service standards and are benchmarked against historical performance data.

Satisfaction Results: