This article by Charlotte Pache sets out the background of, and framework for, the legal system in Hong Kong. It outlines the structure of the courts and the legal profession, and details the practice for obtaining transcripts and judgments. It also provides a survey of law reporting and online resources for further information on case law and statute.

In this paper Lesley Dingle provides a detailed account of the historical development of the public international law collections at the Squire Law Library in Cambridge. She explains the close involvement of the academic lawyers and the librarians, past and present, in developing an important collection which reflects the significance of the subject at Cambridge's Faculty of Law. Finally, she brings things up-to-date by detailing the extent of the electronic provision which benefits the modern scholar in this discipline.

The aim of this qualitative study is to explore new barristers’ information literacy (IL) experiences during their transition from education to the workplace. New barristers are defined as individuals currently doing pupillage or who qualified as professionals in the last two years. Although the transition into work constitutes an important period in new barristers’ legal careers during which they face many IL challenges, so far neither new barristers’ perspectives on their IL experiences nor their transition experiences have been examined in detail. The study employed semi-structured interviews to explore the IL experiences of six new barristers.* This thesis finds that new barristers face a variety of IL challenges and thus have different transition experiences. For them, legal research has emotional implications. As professionals, they have IL needs and experiences that are dissimilar from the ones they developed during their education. This impacts on the content and delivery of IL training for new barristers. The study broadens our understanding of legal IL and new legal professionals’ IL needs. It has implications for law librarians and legal educators as it throws the complexity of new barristers’ workplace IL into relief. Finally, the study offers some recommendations for IL training.

This paper, by Ginevra Peruginelli, examines the general issue of mapping concepts of different legal orders, with a focus on legal terminology and semantics of the law. Interoperability between legal thesauri is a possible operative solution in so far as it meets two important functions: cross-collection retrieval and cross-language retrieval. At a practical level a feasibility study, carried out by the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the National Research Council of Italy is described. The study aims at aligning a number of thesauri used in e-government services within the EU, while testing new methods of automatic mapping.

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 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.

At the BIALL Conference in June 2010 John Duffy presented a paper recounting his experiences of installing a bespoke desktop library interface for all the barristers, with customisation available and utilising Web 2.0 tools.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Infiltrate and Conquer … looks at how librarians might take inspiration from outside of their profession to gain greater visibility and influence within their own workplaces. The piece is a mixture of experiences: from the author, Emily Allbon, from others who have left the profession but who use those skills in other careers, and also from some librarians outside of law. The focus here is on why, and indeed how, to forge partnerships and encourage collaboration with others inside and outside of your profession. The author's Lawbore website and associated technologies will be discussed throughout the article.

This article by Nicola Wakefield looks at the project to build a new academic law library at the University of Salford. It examines the tasks involved, resource planning and communication as well as highlighting successes and issues raised during the construction and design process. The conclusion of the article discusses the lessons learned from undertaking a task of this scale, as well as recommendations for others who may be about to embark on a similar project.

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.

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.

Abstract: The purpose of this paper by Uma Narayan is to provide an insight into how to use Indian legal materials for research purposes. The following subjects are covered: the evolution of the Indian legal system; systems and procedures in enacting laws in Parliament; Indian legal information sources - both government and private - as well as print and electronic sources and how to understand the method of publication of legislation.