This article by Allie Lustigman argues that information professionals should have a significant involvement in their firm's intranets or portals and discusses how our skills can be used in this area. It outlines, with clear examples, the different spheres that we can become involved with in relation to intranets, which include; information organisation and search, taking ownership of intranet pages and spaces, allowing current awareness and news to flow through intranets, and training.

In recent years there has been an explosion of new ‘legal tech’ solutions on the market claiming to solve almost every problem or improve the efficiency of almost any process in a law firm. Alongside these new legal tech vendors are the traditional legal vendors offering enterprise solutions, and it can be challenging to identify, select and implement the right mix of solutions to solve your law firm's knowledge management (KM) needs. If you are thinking about or have been asked to introduce a new KM solution, it can be difficult to know where to get started, especially if you are in this position for the first time. This article, by Richard Tomlinson, explores some techniques and methodologies picked up over several years working in legal technology in big-law, to help you select and implement the best technology solutions for your firm.

In this article, Jackie Fishleigh looks at ways in which legal information managers can demonstrate their personal value and effectively market their services. In so doing she draws on her own recent experience promoting the intranet to every department in her law firm.

This article by John Larkin QC, Attorney General for Northern Ireland, is based on his keynote speech which he delivered at the BIALL Conference which was held in Belfast in June 2012. He discusses the ways in which serendipity can play an important part in researching law, speaks of the frontiers that stand as limitations to contemporary legal research and identifies how these limits can be overcome; and he promotes the importance of both libraries and law librarians.

Wills are an overlooked source. Alongside birth, death and marriage certificates they are official legal texts that provide a record of families, kinship and personal life. They have a particular significance for research about gender and sexuality. This paper, by Daniel Monk, highlights some of the insights that they can provide and discusses the methods (and associated pitfalls) for accessing and reading them.

Sexuality and Law scholarship is a new and developing field but, like most legal scholarship, it is dominated by masculine concerns and methodologies. This article, by Rosemary Auchmuty, explains why research that ignores feminist concerns and methodologies will be incomplete and inaccurate, and suggests questions that should be asked of resources to ensure a complete and accurate coverage of the topic.

The Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture 2019 was delivered at the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians’ Annual Conference by Brenda Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond, DBE,1 the President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. Lady Hale reflected upon some of the major changes in the law and access to justice since she was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge and Willi Steiner was Law Librarian at the Squire Law Library. Her lecture coincided with BIALL's fiftieth anniversary year and focused on five significant developments: the explosion of judicial review of administrative action, the arrival of EU law, the growth of international human rights law, the recognition of gender and other equality, and devolution and the evolution of a new constitutional role for the courts.

The twenty-first century is already proving to be the real dawn of the information revolution. The internet is now officially coming of age and highly functional mobile devices are everywhere. The youth of today are permanently connected and the media world is shifting to a “born digital”, “on line first” mentality. Every part of our society is feeling the effects of this revolution and is reaping the benefits of “real time information everywhere” ... or are they? Adrian Dale, in the second Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture, suggests that the reality is that many businesses are failing to keep pace with information growth and desperately need help – the question is from whom?

Faced with a fragmentation of publishers' portfolios in Germany, the librarian Martina Kuth was interviewed about the challenges to grant a user-oriented library collection in a large commercial law firm like CMS Hasche Sigle.

Professions of all types are being affected by globalisation of markets and the information technology revolution. The information world is developing rapidly and increasing numbers of people are being attracted to working within this modern sphere, many of whom have had no formal information training. Does this mean that a library and information qualification is no longer a requirement and if so why As an information graduate in the modern information world, I have two choices. I can take each day as it comes and become a pawn in a high stakes chess game played by others or I can take individual responsibility and develop my own career.

This article, written by Mark Hatcher, provides an overview of the background and achievements of the Bar Council, the professional body for barristers in England and Wales, since its formation in 1894. It traces the early years of the council and its expansion after the second world war, following the growth in legal aid and other post-war reconstruction measures. It describes changes in the structure and organisation of the Bar Council culminating in the implementation of reforms which followed the Legal Services Act 2007, which resulted in the separation of representation of the Bar from regulation of the profession which was delegated to the Bar Standards Board in 2006. It concludes with an overview of the key issues that are driving the Bar Council's activity to promote the Bar's high quality specialist advocacy and advisory services, and to promote access to justice for all.

In this article, James Mullan addresses the recent trend relating legal project management (LPM) by law firms and assesses the long term potential for this concept. In addition, he seeks to identify how those in the law library and information profession can play a significant role in its introduction and development within a firm.

In May 2003, I had the task of distributing the notice of Willi Steiner's death to colleagues, which is reproduced below. On 27 May an obituary appeared in the Times written by Willi's brother Francis. This article is an opportunity to mark Willi's passing with a substantial account of his career and contribution to the profession of law librarianship and to the process of research and scholarship in law. I would like to thank David Wills, Squire Law Librarian, and Paul Norman of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Library for their assistance.

In the identification, evaluation and acquisition of suitable computer related software products and skills, as well as Internet products and skills, organisations have continuously sought to streamline their business processes. Historically the route taken has been dictated by the outcome of previous decisions — organisations have been governed by their chosen hardware and software environments or had to justify significant re-investment in a change of direction. This could, however, all be about to change radically in the immediate future.

The title of James Shearer's article makes his aim and ambit clear. James Shearer regularly teaches day courses on cataloguing for Aslib, and has recently provided bespoke courses for the London Library and the Library of the European Commission. He is an information consultant and lecturer in information management at the University. With Alan R. Thomas he co-edited Cataloguing and classification: trends, transformations, teaching and training (Haworth Press, 1997). Examples of cataloguingc referred to in the text appear on pp. 14 to 17.

The subject of this article is not strictly limited to law librarianship but I do feel that it is a topic that a large number of us are exposed to and for which I myself initially had little guidance. In the hard financial climate that we have been experiencing recently, negotiating good contract renewals has become a vital skill for any legal information professional.

I'd like to begin with a voyage round my grandfather. Captain Robert Owen was a native of Liverpool. He lived for most of his life not five miles from where we're gathered now. He was a sea captain and he worked for the Harrison Line, a cargo firm trading out of Liverpool to West Africa and America. One of his early commands, from 1899 to 1906, was the cargo vessel Logician. He rose eventually to be commodore captain of the line - and this wasn't because of what he could do, but because of what he knew.

Natalie Wieland, who teaches legal research skills, reflects on her own experiences as a law student undertaking legal research using only paper-based searches and compares them with her current experiences training completely digitally-aware law students in a world heavily biased towards electronic resources.

This article discusses an oral history doctoral research project about the little known, yet critical role of the court clerk in Crown Courts. It is surprising that even though Crown Court clerks have been pivotal in trials of the most serious criminal offences, they have been neglected in legal scholarship. This research project has contributed towards filling an absence in the academic literature about the nature and function of their vital work between 1972 and 2015, and was carried out by Dvora Liberman, in partnership with the London School of Economics Legal Biography Project and National Life Stories, British Library.

Knowledge professionals are often responsible for document automation projects in law firms and in-house legal departments. This article by Robert Lankester is written to provide insight for a wide range of knowledge professionals (in fact anyone curious about document automation), from those for whom it is a new concept to the experienced document automation specialist. First is a discussion of what document automation is (and is not), and the benefits for knowledge management (KM). The main focus of the article is guidance on project implementation, with a specific focus on resourcing. Specific tips for preparing a document for automation and alternative project ideas are included. The article concludes that document automation is a powerful tool for internal knowledge development, enabling deeper collaboration with clients and changing the way legal services are delivered. Resourcing document automation can be approached in a number of ways but whatever the approach, the key is to ensure that business engagement is appropriately catered for.