From Jacqueline Wood at LSS:

It’s been a year since the Family Law Act came into force and that year has been a big one for our Family Law in BC website (FLWS). On March 18, 2013, the Family Law Act (FLA) came into force, bringing major changes to family law in BC. Leading up to that date, the FLWS was completely overhauled so that it was 100% accurate for the new law.

With a change in law that big, you’d expect the FLWS to get some extra attention. We did. What we didn’t expect though was the scale of the attention and how sustained it has been.

To put it in perspective, in the year leading up to the FLA, the FLWS got just under 1,100 visits a day. That’s a solid number. When the FLWS first launched in 2002 — a long time ago by Internet standards — we averaged 2,500 visits a month. So 2,500 in less than three days isn’t bad. On the day the act came into force, the FLWS got just shy of 3,500 visits. That’s not too surprising, though. It’s a big change in law and the FLWS is the go-to reference for family law in BC.

What was surprising? The number of visits didn’t really drop back down. We thought at the time that there would be a surge in numbers as people heard about the FLA in the news, but after a while everything would go back to normal. That hasn’t really been the case, though. In the year following the launch of the FLA, the FLWS has been getting roughly double the amount of visits as it did before.

It turns out that a complete revision of the law not only raised public awareness, but also changed the way people use online resources to find legal information.