The President of the Australian Law Librarians’ Association talks to LIM about her varied career, the problems facing the organisation, and why she believes we're living in a time where those working in the profession can really make a difference.

When sport gets complicated, which it tends to do these days, it's time to call on the specialists, such as sports law lawyers. But just what is sports law, what are the rules of the game, what sort of cases crop up, and what do the lawyers need in terms of resources. Lereesa Easterbrook and Said Sufi of Bird & Bird give us a fascinating – and in this Olympic year timely – insight into this burgeoning legal field.

In the following article Dunstan Speight offers a few initial thoughts on the implications for law libraries of the October 2023 cyber-attack on the British Library. While the remarks apply particularly to larger institutional libraries (such as those of professional bodies like the Inns of Court) there are lessons to be learnt for all types of library and information service.

Last year Jake Hearn, Vice Chair of the LIM editorial board, created an elective module on the core components of and types of roles within the legal information profession, which was offered to postgraduate students at City, University of London, with the module being hosted at City, University of London and The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple. Here Jake gives the reasons for creating the module and tells us how it all came together and how it has progressed since then.

In this article Alan Wheeler advocates for academic librarians to employ the principles of autoethnography and storytelling within their practice, as a tactic for student engagement. As a librarian and researcher operating within Higher Education (HE), Alan has always illustrated his practice with personal accounts of how to operate effectively as a student. Here, he proposes that librarians in academia embrace the autoethnographic principles of vulnerability, uncertainty and subjectivity to explore their position within HE, but also as a teaching tool.

They say that everyone has a book in them. But how do lawyers and other legal professionals go about getting published? How does the publishing process work and what are the benefits of being published? This article by Sian O'Neill of Globe Law and Business outlines the benefits of being published and how the process works, including generating new ideas, approaching a publisher and the publishing proposal, as well as the production process and what authors can expect in terms of marketing.

While every law librarian should be able to find a case, tracking one from claim form to judgment is another thing entirely. Here Anneli Sarkanen outlines why and when this might need to be done, the various sources that are available and the methods that are used

This systematic literature review paper, written by Channarong Intahchomphoo, Jason Millar, Odd Erik Gundersen, Christian Tschirhart, Kris Meawasige and Hojjat Salemi, examines academic research publications to learn about the effects of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics on human labour. Papers were collected from three academic databases: Scopus, Web of Science and ABI/INFORM Collection. From 710 papers, 159 papers were included. The article finds that the effects of AI and robotics on human labour can be categorised as: (i) positive effects, (ii) negative effects, and (iii) neutral or unsure effects. The positive effects have five reasons regarding AI and robotics’ potential to: do dangerous work, do tedious work with high efficiency and accuracy, do some aspects of computing work, do work that human labour does not want to do and be used to deal with the labour shortage, and help to reduce business production and maintenance costs. The negative effects are based on two reasons, that AI and robotics will take over human labour in part or entirely, thereby creating unemployment crises, and will not only replace manually repetitive jobs from human labour but also cognitive jobs, causing human labour to fear that their jobs will be replaced by AI and robotics. The neutral and unsure effects are based on various unique arguments. The findings of this review are used to suggest future research for academic communities and practical recommendations to legal professionals and policy makers.

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 issues, and the issues, of 1984.