Legislation on the Web gives rise to a unique set of challenges. The content has strict rules governing its structure and typographic layout. One piece of legislation can change others, often in complex ways. The text may or may not be in force and may or may not extend to a particular jurisdiction. This unique linked data service and its value proposition is discussed by Carol Tullo. This is a data source that underpins and drives the UK legislation publishing processes and the validation of secondary legislation, providing a streamlined end to end set of online legal tools for all to use.

This paper written by Samuel Wiggins and Marie Cannon is drawn from their presentation at the 2013 BIALL Annual Conference. The article presents the findings of a survey conducted to explore the perceptions of New Professionals in the library and information sector, and the various challenges and issues they face on entering their first professional roles within law librarianship. The relevance of the professional library and information qualification within the legal sector is considered, as are potential barriers to working with legal information. The required skill sets and training needs for New Professionals and experienced professionals are also compared.

At the University of Salford it is a struggle to find sufficient timetable space to deliver in-depth legal research training to new first year students. The training delivered often alienated students due to the information overload they experienced. Timetable pressures resulted in sessions being librarian-led with little interaction with students. This left students feeling overwhelmed, often nervous of using the library and performing research. As a result law students resorted to using Google as their academic research tool of choice. To combat these problems the Law Librarian, Nicola Sales, implemented the innovative training concept of ‘flipping the classroom’. Rather than using teaching time to instruct students in ‘how to’ perform research by demonstrating resources and concepts, the classroom was flipped so students studied online content before entering the classroom. Face to face teaching time was then spent actively learning through practical tasks and discussion to consolidate student learning. Students took responsibility for their own learning and teaching sessions were based on group work and discussion, facilitated by the librarian rather than being librarian-led. This article is based on the presentation, ‘Flipping Training’ delivered at the BIALL Conference 2013. It will look at how the ‘flipping the classroom’ concept works and how it has been implemented at the University of Salford. It will examine the benefits and drawbacks of flipping training as well as ideas for implementing flipped training within other organisations.

A presentation about collaboration, itself the product of a collaboration, looking at a collaborative project as an example of the value of people from different teams working together! That was Peter Griffith and Pete Smith at the BIALL Conference 2014 in Glasgow, a conference which took as its theme ‘law as a business.’ They discuss the challenges with reference to the LawSync project.

With job hunters seemingly now outnumbering vacancies in the legal information field by some margin, recruiters currently have plenty of choice in front of them when seeking to fill a post with the right candidate. In the current market, the applicants themselves need to do everything they can to maximise their chances of selection. The general aspects of good and bad practice in job hunting and recruiting should be obvious to everybody of a professional status. But are they? We're all supposed to know the textbook dos and don'ts of recruitment and selection; but how much attention are employers and candidates in the information sector really paying to the detail? Through his role as Library Manager in the London branch of a national network of law schools, Mark Haines has sat on the recruitment and interview panels for over thirty posts over the past six years. He has also been job hunting himself during this time; applying for more than fifty posts over the past two years, and attending more than a dozen interviews. As a result of these experiences, he has witnessed countless examples of good and bad practice. Employers and applicants may all be aware of what they should be doing, but in this paper he will be discussing his experiences of what they're really doing; and most importantly, what can be done to improve performance in the light of this.

In this article Jackie Fishleigh reviews and analyses three of the sessions, held at the BIALL Conference 2013 in Glasgow, that were concerned with ‘soft skills’.

Is Google a substitute for using known, authoritative websites for cases, legislation and other official information? Ian Hunter writes about the test searches that he carried out on Google and discusses the results he noted. In this exercise, consideration is given to whether the websites retrieved are authoritative and also attention is paid to Google's ranking of results.

This article, analysing the results of the Academic Law Library Survey for 2011/2012 has been written by David Gee, Deputy Librarian at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. The survey was conducted on behalf of Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) and BIALL.

The calm and courteous mannerisms that Professor Len Sealy's interviews radiate belie a pragmatic determination that has been the hallmark of his long and productive career. For nearly six decades he has been a legal pioneer, working assiduously to elevate the law of commerce, and in particular company law and insolvency, to scholarly respectability in academia and practical understanding in boardrooms. Yet typically, for one who spent his entire professional life collaborating with wealth creators of the commercial world, he eschewed direct personal involvement in such activities. His loyalty to the scholastic tradition, mirrored in his unstinting service to his college and the Faculty, has generated a legacy of fond regard and intellectual respect. These reflections by Professor Sealy are based on interviews with Lesley Dingle at the Squire Law Library during February and April 2013. They should be read in conjunction with Professor Sealy's entry in the Eminent Scholars Archive1.