Back in December 2009, I joined Arnold & Porter as an information professional. Working at a law firm that values and celebrates the contributions made by their support staff, has meant that this role has transformed into a very rewarding career. Reflecting on the last 10 years, the one word I would use to sum up law librarianship is expertise. As information professionals, we research and review areas and concepts that are unfamiliar but we are adept at not only pinpointing the key points and issues but conveying them with clarity, certainty and confidence. As well as providing this invaluable support, we guide, inform and advise. Over the past decade, BIALL has remained central to the law librarian community, helping us to navigate the ever changing landscape of the legal sector.

The library of the Royal Faculty of Procurators in Glasgow has been in existence for over 190 years. It is open to all practising and retired solicitors, advocates and law firms. This article by John McKenzie briefly outlines its history, relevance to the legal profession today, current set-up, challenges and future.

Law publishing in Scotland has seen something of a renaissance during the last 20 years. This article by Margaret Cherry is an overview of Scots law publishing from a Scottish perspective. It looks at the factors which influence publishing decisions, including market and economic considerations and the nature of Scots law itself. It also covers the principal publishers – both past and current – who have produced books on Scots law.

This paper, taken from a presentation given by Melanie Farquharson, 3Kites Consulting, to the 39th Annual BIALL Conference held in Dublin in June 2008, discusses recent developments in the provision of federated search systems and how they can ease the legal research process. It also considers the attitude of legal publishers to such systems.

This article, by Daniel Hayter of Bloomberg Law, is based on a series of seminars presented to legal information professionals during 2007–2008. It includes a guide to corporate finance and methods of raising money in the capital markets. The author also describes the topical area of mortgage-backed securities.

A campaign to bring the law up-to-date with the current world of publishing has been led by the British Library, on behalf of all the legal deposit libraries and the publisher trade bodies. If the move is successful, new generic legislation will ensure that non-print formats are included within legal deposit – allowing UK businesses and education to benefit from access to the widest possible collections of research material, now and in the future.

In this article John Bell follows his previous LIM article which was published in December 20121 by suggesting that, despite the development towards an open access world for publically funded research, the journal as a form of publication for peer reviewed research is far from dead; indeed, it has an active role to play in the future.

In this article Margarethe Sannino shares some information on how legal research works in an international law firm with several offices. The focus is on German law and legal materials. A short introduction to German law is followed by an outline of German research resources in general and then, further on, there are two parts describing specific approaches to research from Margarethe's daily work; research on company/corporate law requests as well as research on legislative acts.

This article aims to give a broad outline of what the JISC Legal Information Service is and why it was set up. In particular it deals with the challenges of the Internet and the new legislation that attempts to regulate it or stimulate its use. The Internet is fast becoming embedded in the FE/HE sector, in teaching and learning, research and administration–ignore it at your peril some might say. Yet there are risks to this, in some cases, enthusiastic rush to embrace all things that utilise the WWW. The relative ease of access, extraction and dissemination on ‘the net’ has tempted some to overlook the legalities. This article summarises briefly the main areas of law under consideration and the potential costs of infringement. It explains that FE/HE is subject to this legislation sometimes in specific ways. It concludes by stressing the need for feedback from the sector including BIALL members in order that the service can improve.

This paper is written by Gineke Wiggers, Suzan Verberne and Gerrit-Jan Zwenne and examines citations in legal documents in the context of bibliometric-enhanced legal information retrieval. It is suggested that users of legal information retrieval systems wish to see both scholarly and non-scholarly information, and legal information retrieval systems are developed to be used by both scholarly and non-scholarly users. Since the use of citations in building arguments plays an important role in the legal domain, bibliometric information (such as citations) is an instrument to enhance legal information retrieval systems. This paper examines, through literature and data analysis, whether a bibliometric-enhanced ranking for legal information retrieval should consider both scholarly and nonscholarly publications, and whether this ranking could serve both user groups, or whether a distinction needs to be made. Their literature analysis suggests that for legal documents, there is no strict separation between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. There is no clear mark by which the two groups can be separated, and in as far as a distinction can be made, literature shows that both scholars and practitioners (non-scholars) use both types. They perform a data analysis to analyze this finding for legal information retrieval in practice, using citation and usage data from a legal search engine in the Netherlands. They first create a method to classify legal documents as either scholarly or non-scholarly based on criteria found in the literature. We then semi- automatically analyze a set of seed documents and register by what (type of) documents they are cited. This resulted in a set of 52 cited (seed) documents and 3086 citing documents. Based on the affiliation of users of the search engine, we analyzed the relation between user group and document type. The authors’ data analysis confirms the literature analysis and shows much crosscitations between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. In addition, we find that scholarly users often open non-scholarly documents and vice versa. Our results suggest that for use in legal information retrieval systems citations in legal documents measure part of a broad scope of impact, or relevance, on the entire legal field. This means that for bibliometric-enhanced ranking in legal information retrieval, both scholarly and non-scholarly documents should be considered. The disregard by both scholarly and non-scholarly users of the distinction between scholarly and non-scholarly publications also suggests that the affiliation of the user is not likely a suitable factor to differentiate rankings on. The data in combination with literature suggests that a differentiation on user intent might be more suitable.

This article by Thomas Shaw discusses the key findings of an MSc dissertation which examined legal information professionals' perceptions of what facilitates, and what impedes, the use of free and paid-for legal information resources. It also compares and contrasts the views of information professionals working in academia with those working in law firms. It is situated in the context of significant criticism of commercial legal publishing and the existence of many resources providing free legal information.

Wendy Small considers the potentially far-reaching changes in the structure of law firms in the light of the recession and advises information professionals on how they should reconsider the nature of the services they offer to ensure that they remain business critical.

Andrew Mills, of Freeth Cartwright LLP, gave a paper at the 38th Annual BIALL Study Conference in Sheffield in June 2007 on blogging. He describes how he set up IMPACT(R), his blog, which covers intellectual property and IT issues. He describes the software he used and the potential pitfalls involved when starting out. He emphasises the importance of using RSS feeds and considers whether blogs will present a threat to traditional hard copy publishing because of the speed with which they can communicate information.

In this article, three members of the BIALL Publications Committee, Katy Davies, Kate Manning and Jude Wilson, relate their experience of lockdown in their working environments and mention some of the ways that the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL), as a professional organisation, has been supporting its members.

Ben Beljaars and René Winter contribute a thoroughly well-researched article on the profile of current users of academic libraries in Holland. They discuss their information requirements and usage; the relationship between the library and the law faculty; the use of digital resources in legal education and developments in legal information literacy.

In this conference report Vola Walker gives an account of the conference of the Australian Law Librarians Association (ALLA) held in Sydney in 2013.

In this paper presented at the Joint Study Institute in Oxford, Michael Bowman traces the history of international law, with its basis in custom, and identifies the late Nineteeth century as the period when multi-lateral treaties became commonplace. He considers whether such treaties, which were essentially static in nature, provide a suitable framework for the Twenty-first century global community. However, since the Vienna Convention, treaties have become dynamic as they now incorporate mechanisms for continuous monitoring and review of treaty obligations.

In this paper Samuel Wiggins uses the results of a survey undertaken by the author in 2011 as a way to contemplate both current and future issues for the legal information sector. The survey results act as a point of reflection for four key areas challenging the profession; relationships between lawyers and librarians, changing budgets, the nature of enquiries, and job roles. The article concludes by reminding the reader of the importance of reflection on their work, as well as highlighting areas where law librarians might strengthen their position within their firm.