Hester Swift writes about the successful one-day courses on foreign and international legal research that have been run since 2009 at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) in conjunction with BIALL. These courses have been a collaborative venture between the Foreign and International Law Librarians at the Bodleian Law Library at Oxford, the Squire Law Library at Cambridge, and the IALS Library, together with law librarians from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies and the University of Cardiff. The courses have attracted delegates from many different sectors of the legal information profession. The post of Foreign and International Law Librarian, or Foreign, Comparative and International Law Librarian, is relatively new to the UK, but has a long history in the United States. The BIALL-IALS foreign and international law training initiative complements the cooperation of the Foreign Law Research (FLARE) Group.

The need to monitor competitor activity and anticipate competitive actions is a standard activity for most businesses. In order to succeed and grow, firms need to understand what rival firms are doing, and furthermore what is happening in the overall business environment. However unlike a manufacturing company, or a high-street retailer, or indeed many other businesses, obtaining intelligence on competitors is not so easy for professional service firms.

Lexis and Westlaw are the biggest names in subscription legal database provision, and have been settled here in the UK long enough to be the subject of a little comparative critical examination. I hope to provide this in what follows, with the caveat that my experience is of academic subscriptions, which may vary in content from their commercial counterparts. I do have the advantage of access to the respective American academic versions, so that some comparisons can also be made in that direction.

In 2012 London becomes the first city to host an Olympics for the third time. The contrast between the Games of 2012 and those of 1908 and 1948 could not be starker and form a background to some of the matters discussed in this short piece. Central to the discussion is the contention that the development of the body of law now known as sports law is related to the accelerated commercialisation of sport during the past century. In short, the business of modern sport is exactly that – a business; indeed, sport is now a global industry and the commodification of sport will be seen to an exaggerated effect in London throughout the summer of 2012. Accordingly, this article by Jack Anderson begins by giving an outline of the financial robustness of modern sport, epitomised by the Olympics, before presenting a brief history of the evolution of sports law. Thereafter various issues in contemporary sports law are identified and discussed. The conclusion attempts to bring all of these themes together in order to give an overview of the area as a discrete, vibrant, if still emerging, discipline of law.

This article by Paul Billingham of Concept Searching and Phil Ayton of UC Logic covers the history of computerised searching aids in the context of knowledge management projects and describes conceptSearching, which is a scientific approach to trying to solve natural language searching problems using a number of techniques, not just an algorithm. They also consider federated searching and describe the Sysero information portal and a taxonomy manager application.

This article by John Furlong is an updated and revised version of an article originally authored by John Furlong and Susan Doe and published in Legal Information Management 2006, 6(2) Summer 2006 and covers in some detail the basic sources for researching European Union law. It also gives some background on the growth of the European Union and its law making.

Carl Clayton, Director, SINTO - the information partnership, writes that there is no shortage of legal information, yet for some people it can still be difficult to get access to the legal information they may need as citizens. Libraries in the Sheffield area have a strong history of co-operation but this cannot remove all the barriers.

This article by Craig Gerrard, Librarian, Weightmans LLP reports on plans being drawn up by the Finnish library authorities to implement a huge digital library.

This article by Gareth Ryan, Law and Official Publications Librarian, describes the history of the library, outlines the courses offered by the law school and details the collections and services offered by the law library.

This report, compiled by Gerry Power, describes the process of updating the records of the FLAG (Foreign Law Guide) database. His article outlines the aims, method and the findings of the 2013 update.

The chairman of the European Information Association examines some of the more useful sources of regular information for those seeking to keep up to date on the European Union, its institutions and legislative process. Having reviewed the key official sources, such as the Rapid database and the press site of the European Commission's Representation in London, he explains the importance of the free services available from the various commercial producers of EU information.

Rich personal and institutional archives, antiquarian manuscript collections and published resources make the British Library an obvious choice for biographical research. While these collections include material relating to high ranking legal officials, legislators, renowned legal scholars and their correspondents the article moves beyond this view of legal biographical source materials. Examples of resources from across the Library's diverse collections are presented through a particular perspective on information needs and sources in broadly socio-legal research. In contribution to the theme of methods in legal biographical research this framework is offered, together with signposts to discovery aids as a way of conceptualising the Library's resource. In doing so, various notions of the nature of legal biographical research, its subjects and its source information are considered in this article by Jonathan Sims.

Martin Hannibal and Alison Pope of from Staffordshire University have written this article to explain why Practical Legal Research (PLR) skills are necessary for a trainee solicitor and how the Law Society's learning objectives for PLR are achieved and assessed on the Staffordshire Legal Practice Course (LPC). The article should be read in conjunction with the article by Eileen Fry which also appears in this issue.

This list of sources for arbitration law has been compiled by Michelle Celik to accompany the article by Nigel Broadbent on alternative dispute resolution.

Legal information management is crucial for Chinese Lawyers who practice law in non-litigation and litigation legal areas. Li Zheng, Attorney at Law from PRC, provides a brief overview of the legal procedure, at a practical level, from the point of view of a Chinese lawyer.

In this article Christian Wolf seeks to identify and understand the nature of the profession of law librarianship in Germany. The first question he seeks to address is whether there is a recognised profession at all. He explains some basic principles of German public and labour law and then, having laid this foundation, he describes the profession of law librarianship in Germany in detail.

Despite a lack of a national legislation that mandates open government information in the People's Republic of China, each major government branch has taken proactive efforts to make primary legal information issued within their power available to the public. A close examination of Chinese official legal information portals on the national level reveal issues such as a lack of uniformity and a lack of access to authenticated primary legal information. This article, by Xiaomeng Zhang1, proposes a solution that would not only offer more consistent guidelines for the government but would empower the public to assert their right to primary legal information more powerfully and effectively.

Professor Sir John Baker was born in Sheffield in April 1944 towards the end of the Second World War. His path into legal history was via the Edward VI Grammar School in Chelmsford, and University College London (UCL) in the early 1960s. It was his good fortune that lecturing arrangements still in place at UCL as a wartime legacy caused him to fall under the inspirational guidance of Professor Toby Milsom at LSE for his legal history tuition. By the time John Baker moved to Cambridge in 1971 he had been called to the Bar at the Inner Temple, and his interest in the development of the common law in the late mediaeval/early Tudor period was firmly grounded. The next forty years were spent at Cambridge, where he established an enviable reputation as an innovative and meticulous scholar, whose publications output has become legendary. He retired from the Downing Chair of the Laws of England in 2011, and was knighted for his services to legal history in 2003. This article by Lesley Dingle attempts to highlight some aspects of Professor Baker's illustrious career, and should be read in conjunction with his entry in the Cambridge Eminent Scholars Archive, both of which are based on interviews that she conducted with Sir John in the Law Faculty in February-March 2017.

Melinda Renner, from the University of New Brunswick, writes about her experiences as a New England Law Library Consortium International Fellow who was seconded to the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London. She describes the visits she made and her impressions of how academic librarianship in Britain and Canda appear to share many of the same issues and problems.

This paper was presented by Penny Bailey at the 38th BIALL Annual Study Conference held in Sheffield in June 2007 and covers the challenges involved in introducing a knowledge management strategy to a law firm. It suggests methods to be adopted in trying to implement such a service including identification with the firm's business objectives; persuasive communication; identification of the benefits accruing and strategies for collecting knowledge.