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.

In this analysis of the future of our profession, Barbara Tearle starts by looking at the past to see how much the world of legal information has evolved and changed. She considers the nature of the profession today and then identifies key factors which she believes will be of importance in the future, including the impact of globalisation; the potential changes to the legal profession; technology; developments in legal education; increasing commercialisation and changes to the law itself.

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.

Jack Diggle from Prince OMC provides an overview of the world of outsourcing legal services. He explains the various methods of outsourcing and provides a glossary of the terms involved. He tells us what is happening in the UK in terms of outsourcing legal information work and explains how the concept of outsourcing began.

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.

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.

This opinion article, by Channarong Intahchomphoo and Christian Tschirhart, explains the evolution of data and how it becomes useful information and then insightful knowledge. In the current era we are witnessing a high increase in the development and adaptation of artificial intelligence (AI) in society. AI technologies have the ability to process large volumes of data and information to help in finding insightful knowledge. However, AI is not perfect and there are ethical concerns, particularly when unintended negative consequences result from it; this paper also discusses ethical concerns currently confronting our society related to the freedom of expression and hate speech issues with AI. Importantly, this paper notes that governments are working to find ways to regulate social media and internet companies through legal channels as governments are no longer confident in the ability of social media and internet companies to self-regulate and thereby to guide society on what content is right or wrong. This is a critical new development in internet and AI governance that information and technology professionals and public and private organizations need to monitor closely the situation as it evolves.

Marci Hoffman, General Editor of the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, reports on how this major multilingual legal index handles its content, and how it is developing in the electronic era.*

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.

This new service won the Halsbury's Award for the Best Legal Information Service – Non-Commercial Sector at the recent BIALL Conference in Dublin. Chris Holland explains the background to the project and outlines plans for its future development.

Guy Holborn, Librarian of Lincoln's Inn, considers whether the Inns of Court libraries have a future in the digital age. He discusses their longevity and their context within the profession. Unfortunately, the past gives several examples of such libraries which have not survived, but he is confident that history will not repeat itself.

This paper by Professor Gillian Triggs seeks to explore whether the traditional principles of public international law are ‘fit for purpose’ in responding to such contemporary threats to collective security by reference to three issues: the regulation of the use of force; the need to balance the sovereign rights of states with humanitarian concerns; and the relationship between human rights and the orthodox rules applicable to prisoners of war and security detainees.

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.

There are currently 18,456 attorneys and Candidate attorneys registered with the Law Society of South Afric and 5,941 registered law firms (CLE 2002). Data is not yet available regarding the size distribution of these law firms but a glance at any of the national legal directories will reveal that the majority of attorneys operate as solo practitioners or in association with a few colleagues. A large city practice will generally be well supplied with information resources and with assistance from a librarian or information professional. In a small practice, the information resources that the attorney has at his or her disposal may be limited to a few textbooks, supplemented in some cases with access to electronic databases and Internet resources. Small practices seldom employ information professionals, although they may make use of the services of information agencies and independent contractors to assist with research and/or information management.

Mark Stanley and Tamara Eisenschitz examine the relationship between professional support lawyers and information professionals in law firms of varying sizes. The results broadly support the hypothesis that tensions in larger firms between the two groups are less apparent. More importantly tensions are reduced where each group is doing clearly delineated work, irrespective of the firm's size. Tensions between the two groups are no longer the issue they once were, but these could reignite, especially if information professionals with legal qualifications and PSLs without fee earning experience vye for similar work. This paper recommends that to avoid frictions it is essential for law firm managers to get to grips with the nature and capabilities of these two groups and utilise them appropriately.

When we examine the implications of US and UK governmental responses to the events of 9/11 for the privacy rights of their citizens, we have to begin from the understanding that even prior to 9/11 there were relatively few congruencies between the two legal systems. While neither country has an explicit constitutional right to privacy, in the US the Supreme Court decided in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) that for many of the other constitutional rights to be meaningful, there had to be at least an implicit right to privacy derivable from the Constitution. In contrast, the concept of a right of personal privacy, to protect the individual from third parties generally, or from government in particular, is one which, until recently, has been largely alien to the law of the United Kingdom. Unlike the situation in the United States, the judiciary in the UK has consistently declined to provide specific sectoral privacy rights, via the common law, that might eventually be developed into a general right of privacy. Legislative attempts to create such a general right have met with an equal lack of enthusiasm. Where specific sectoral statutory protections of privacy have been adopted by the UK Parliament they have, almost without exception, come about as a result of pressures at an international level, not the least as a result of actions, or threats of actions, under the European Convention on Human Rights, or as a result of economic requirements consequent upon the UK's membership of the EU.

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 this article, based on a presentation at the BIALL Annual Conference in 2019, Renae Satterley and Adam Woellhaf discuss the methodology and potential effectiveness of using contingent valuation surveys in law libraries. Their approach is based on the Middle Temple Library's experience of running such a survey in 2018.

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.