Keri Gray gave a practical presentation at the June 2010 BIALL Conference covering practical tips and techniques to make the most of yourself before and during an interview.

John Furlong reviews the law firm sector in Ireland as it weathers the storms of recession and the winds of change. The article provides details on the size and scale of the sector as well as statistical information on solicitors and law firms.

Marianne Barber offers some practical observations from a trial introduction of eTextbooks at the College of Law. Ebook versions of the textbooks produced by the College (and published commercially by College of Law Publishing) were made available for the first time in 2010 to its Legal Practice Course students. This paper was originally presented at the BIALL Conference in June 2011 and included an overview of the variety of licensing models/platforms available, an analysis of the then level of response from teaching staff and students and likely touch-points for mass adoption in the legal field.

In this article Peter Kargbo describes the impact of the first national lockdown, due to Covid-19, on students using the Hartley Library at the University of Southampton. He describes some of the ways that library services responded and looks at some aspects concerning collection development. He begins his article by taking a brief look at life in the library for students prior to the arrival of the pandemic before describing the period that followed up to the end of the academic year in summer 2020.

This paper is based on the presentation given by Heather Semple of the Northern Ireland Law Society to the 39th Annual BIALL Conference held in Dublin in June 2008 and covers the historical and constitutional background to the country. The paper then considers sources of legislation and case law and provides helpful tips on how to undertake research within the complicated and difficult system of legislative publishing.

In this article Michael Maher, Librarian of the Law Society of England and Wales, examines the history of the extensive library on Chancery Lane, the range of services it provides to help support its members (including their agents i.e. law librarians) and the future plans for the library.

This article by former law librarian, Jennifer Smith, highlights access and security issues to consider when handling sensitive information. Jennifer is a Director of the Information Management and IT consultancy, OneIS, which specialises in working with smaller organisations with complex information management requirements. The article provides practical advice and is particularly aimed at readers working in organisations without dedicated information security professionals.

This article, written by Claire Bonello, presents the French collaborative project to digitise, spread and preserve heritage law collections. As a result, Gallica, the French national digital and encyclopedic library, gives freely access to a “law information universe”. This digital law library from heritage collections on Gallica is set to become a central point of access to legal contents for researchers as well as for jurists.

John Furlong attended the Annual Conference of the Canadian Association of Law Librarians (CALL/ACBD) and was particularly interested in the sessions involving the way in which clients are now taught about legal materials and the importance of teaching internet literacy or “neteracy”.

Cath Hancock, Staff Development Officer at Cardiff University, and Alison Clayton of Cameron McKenna have supplied us with two articles addressing aspects of the recruitment and selectiom process. This article from Cath Hancock concentrates on the pre-intervies process but also looks briefly at post-interview issues.

This article has been written by Janice Sayer, a freelance information manager, who has extensive and unrivalled experience of working on the content of the Westlaw UK legislation database.

Elizabeth Marley describes the addition of subject and other indexing metadata at the UK Parliament, contributing to the internal databases and to services to the public on the Parliamentary website, and the operation of the thesauri and controlled vocabularies used in enriching Parliamentary content.

Fiona Fogden discusses how negotiation skills can be applied within the information service. She uses a case-study, which involves evaluating the renewal of a news subscription service and the importance of considering which people may be involved in that negotiation, to illustrate her advice.

Legal Information Management has reached 50 years since it was launched, under a different name, by the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL). In this article the current editor of the journal, David Wills, reviews the history of the journal from its launch in spring 1970 when it took the name The Law Librarian, and describes how it has evolved, often reflecting the changing nature of the legal information profession in those intervening years. He follows the journey as this periodical developed from small beginnings, explains how it was enhanced by successive editors, why it became necessary to change its title in 2001 and describes the move to the current publisher, Cambridge University Press in 2004. He reflects on the current status of the journal, as an electronic product while also retaining its profile in print and, finally, he draws attention to some possible challenges for the future.

Claire Greening explores some of the challenges that library and information professionals face when weighing up hard copy and online resources. Rather than trying to establish a preferred or ‘best’ format, this article instead explores the advantages that both formats have to offer and considers how they can co-exist within the law library. The article concludes with some questions to ask when purchasing and organising resources and explores some of the practical considerations to take into account regarding training.

How does a supplier of information products, whether in an electronic or hardcopy format, go about keeping a customer happy when that customer happens to be a law librarian? The challenge of providing excellent service is of as much interest to the law librarian as a provider of services as it is to him or her as a consumer of services. For the session entitled “I can't get no satisfaction?” a panel of speakers was created consisting of David Smalley (Commercial Director at Lawtel), Paul Baker (Executive Director, Operations at Butterworths) and Pippa Hall (Customer Services Manager at Sweet & Maxwell). The panel was asked to focus on customer care and how it might be improved. As leading players in the field of customer care within the legal information sector how have they dealt with the issues of billing and customer support and how have they communicated with those customers that have raised problems? Do the speakers see a role for law librarians in the process of product development? How do the speakers see their products developing in the future and how do they expect future developments to be communicated to law librarians in the future?

The Olympic Games are the world's most recognised international sporting event alongside the FIFA World Cup. Started in ancient Greece, the Olympic Games were revived in modern times in 1896 and occur every four years. This article, by Esther Cho, discusses how to research the structure and legal aspects of the Olympic Movement. It also encompasses the general array of international sports law resources connected to the Olympic Movement.

This article is broadly based upon a presentation given by Gordon Anthony, which was given at the annual conference of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians on 15 June 2012 in Belfast. Its purpose is to outline some of the ways in which public law in Northern Ireland is unique within the wider setting of the UK. Although it is true that the law of Northern Ireland shares much in common with principle and practice elsewhere in the UK, there are some notable differences that are attributable to the fact that Northern Ireland has its own court system and legal and political history. The article thus examines some of the differences that exist at the constitutional level and which can be associated with, most famously, the Belfast Agreement 1998. It also summaries some of the differences that can be found at the level of legal citation, for instance of case law and statute law for the jurisdiction.

On reflection, if it were not for BIALL I might well not be writing this. I am not referring to John's invitation to give a presentation in Cork but to the fact that BIALL played a pivotal role in my becoming a professional support lawyer. In 1997, Kate Hodgson and I were awarded BIALL bursaries to go to the AALL Conference in Baltimore; while we were there, Kate happened to tell me about the PSLs at her firm, Cameron McKenna, and the work they did. The more she told me, the more I thought, like the character Mike in the musical A Chorus Line, ‘I can do that, I can do that!’ I came home from Baltimore having gained not only a good friend but also the idea of changing my career in a way that would combine my legal training and my law library and publishing experience.

In this article I'll be covering the following:

[bull ] some widely held perceptions of distance learning

[bull ] how distance learning takes place within law at The Nottingham Trent University (NTU)

[bull ] the UK Libraries Plus national support scheme for distance learning students in the UK

[bull ] how I provide support for my distance learners

[bull ] the practical difficulties that distance learners face

[bull ] perceptions or misconceptions? – do my original perceptions still hold true?

[bull ] some ideas for the future

At this point, I should point out that I'm not promoting The Nottingham Trent University as a model of best practice, but just outlining our experiences. If anyone has any more sensible approaches or solutions to the issues I'll be covering then please let me know.