The coronavirus pandemic has had a profound effect on the conduct of legal business generally, but nowhere perhaps more drastically than on the conduct of litigation in the courts. This article by Paul Magrath considers how the judiciary, court services and practitioners of England and Wales have been working together to continue to administer justice in spite of the restrictions necessitated by the pandemic, and the challenges that have been faced in managing court information and reporting court proceedings.

This article argues that a migration from print resources to electronic access is required to democratise access to legal information for lawyers, and that resource managers should seize this opportunity to ‘go digital’ while lawyers are more accepting of change and open to new technologies as a result of forced changes to working practices during the Covid-19 pandemic. The author, Jas Breslin, a law library professional with 20-plus years of experience, explains how the sector is now grasping the nettle.

The Covid-19 pandemic drastically changed the information landscape. For us it exponentially increased our workload and unequivocally demonstrated how much value we could add to the business. The skill set of information professionals is in demand like never before, changing many of our roles for the better. This article, written by Felicity Cross, discusses the effect the pandemic has had on her department and what that means for our profession as a whole.

In this article Ian Hunter considers his experiences, learning points and recommendations on running an international law firm research service from home for 6 months, after being sent home at one hour's notice. In the article he considers working from home, including the psychological benefits of having a ‘journey’ to work, providing a research service and a library service, managing a team and the use of communications technology.

In the 1760s a newly qualified apprentice to the King's Geographer hit upon the idea of cutting up maps for children to assemble as a geographical teaching aid. Dissected maps remain popular to this day in their evolved form as jigsaw puzzles. This article, written by Alison Million during the Covid-19 lockdown when jigsaws have exploded in popularity, looks at their history and at research projects which have established their cognitive benefits or have used them as an inexpensive non-digital tool. By considering papers written on librarians’ thinking styles and on personality it seeks to establish with the help of a short survey whether parallels might exist between the cognitive skillsets of the jigsaw puzzler and those of the librarian.

In this article, three members of the BIALL Publications Committee, Katy Davies, Kate Manning and Jude Wilson, relate their experience of lockdown in their working environments and mention some of the ways that the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL), as a professional organisation, has been supporting its members.

The impact of the Covid 19 lockdown of Western countries has had extensive coverage, but for other countries, like Myanmar, little information has been shared in the Western media. Yet the impact on everyday activities there has been just as great, including closure of workplaces and universities, the wearing of masks, and restrictions on travellers from outside Myanmar. When a planned programme of face-to-face legal research teaching in May 2020 could not be offered, another means had to be found to deliver a course which had been successfully introduced the previous year. In this article Ruth Bird outlines how the course went ahead even though she was in lockdown in Melbourne, while her colleagues and participants were locked down in Yangon.

This article is designed for law librarians based outside the United States. The paper, written by Marcia Zubrow, provides basic information about the United States legal system and its sources. This background foundation to the article is important in understanding how to effectively use the two major U.S. databases, Lexis and Westlaw. The author describes the contents of the two databases within the context of the background information. Search techniques, including advance searching strategies, are described.