President for 2024/25, Claire Mazer, talks to LIM about her career as an academic law librarian, the challenges facing both BIALL and the profession, and how she's enjoying her time at the head of the organisation

The 9th Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture took place during the BIALL Annual Conference at the Queens Hotel, Leeds on Thursday 13 June 2024. David Wills delivered the lecture and looked back over the last three decades and reflected on the many changes and challenges, especially with regard to technological developments, that have impacted on the law library and legal information world. His focus then shifted to more recent times and developments in law at a global level and the associated challenges of curating resources and collections to match the wide variety of interests across legal scholarship. The lecture touched on the demands in legal education, changes to publishing models, the financial challenges facing higher education and, most recently, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic that altered research and study patterns, and which accelerated the demand for digital resources. Finally, the lecture looked to the next 30 years and the unstoppable rise of artificial intelligence (AI), in order to determine what AI would mean for the future of law librarianship. The lecture identified the part law librarians and legal information professionals could play concerning AI and how they could help to protect academic integrity.

LexisNexis’ Matthew Leopold explains how his team conducted a wide range of interviews with those involved in the legal education system – including librarians, academics, heads of law schools and university leaders – in order to gauge their feelings and thoughts on the impact artificial intelligence (AI) will have, and is having, on the sector. Matthew then goes through the findings, which shows a diverse set of views on AI.

Catherine Parkin is a librarian at Leeds Beckett University (LBU), while Aarti Sehgal is a librarian at the University of Sheffield (TUoS). These institutions both have around 1200 students registered on a taught Law course. Against the background of an increased need to prove academic libraries are obtaining ‘value for money’ from subscription resources, alongside the desire for law students to be effective and critical users of information, this article explores database engagement activities carried out at the authors’ institutions. It considers the impact of teaching and online tutorials created to engage students with resources, and discusses tools used to check resource usage.

England and Wales have no public law libraries, so how does the general public find legal information? This article, written by Abi Reader, Assistant Librarian at Certara Predictive Technologies, provides a starting point in understanding the availability of publicly available legal information. It explores the intersection of two austerity measures, cuts to legal aid and public library spending, through searching public library catalogues for primary sources of law. Public libraries provide computers and internet access to search free online legal information sites but overall provide limited access to print law reports. This article is based on research presented at the 54th Annual BIALL Conference.

The transformative journey of law librarianship has been marked by significant milestones, from the transition from hard copy to online access, to the current development and implementation of artificial intelligence (AI). This article is based on a presentation at the BIALL Conference in June 2024 by Melissa Mills, Knowledge Manager at William Roberts Lawyers, and explores this evolution, focusing on her experiences and insights gained over the years, particularly in the Australian context.

In this article Amy Kaufman, Head Law Librarian at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada, examines what role Canadian law libraries can take in responding to the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Report in 2015, which examined the treatment of Aboriginal people in the country throughout its history, and its Calls to Action.

The Japanese art of Kintsugi teaches that imperfections and failures are not flaws to hide but opportunities for growth and enrichment; it says that true strength and beauty come from embracing imperfection and learning from the fractures along the way. In this article Hélène Russell draws on insights from three conference experiences to show how KM professionals can make use of Kintsugi and act as the ‘golden joiners’ within their firms when it comes to AI projects, making use of their blend of resilience, organisational cultural awareness, communication skills, and adaptive knowledge-sharing practices.

While we are aware that algorithms are at play in the background of much of what we do in our day-to-day life they are still widely misunderstood, says Sarah A Sutherland, the founder and principal consultant at Parallax Information Consulting. Here Sarah talks us through how we should approach our technology adoption by considering what algorithms are being used for and what the underlying technology and data that supports them actually is.

The Employment Rights Bill was published in October 2024. In this article, Bob Cordran, an Employment Partner at Memery Crystal, takes a look at the key reforms at the heart of it.

The decisions of courts and tribunals, and the statutes that societies live under, are the building blocks to the rule of law. Access to this information for legal professionals can be difficult while access for the general public is often impossible. This article by Gavin Sheridan, the co-founder and CEO at Vizlegal, considers a first principles approach to the barriers to access, how the legal industry has adapted, how technology companies can address and improve it and how the future of legal information involves open access, open standards and innovation built on top of legal data.

In the latest in our series reviewing archived copies of Legal Information Management and The Law Librarian – as the journal was once known – LIM's co-editors leaf through the four issues published in 2004.