Within UK law firms, marketing or business development departments have traditionally been responsible for the provision of business information. Sue Lamond, from Addleshaw Goddard, explains how her firm differs in that the Information Services department is responsible for this provision. The department compiles company and sector profiles and analyses, and is directly involved in the pitch process for new work from clients, supporting client partners' information and development needs.

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.

The authors, Karen Gray, Diane Miller, Karen Scott and Kate Stanfield, are experienced legal information professionals who are responsible both for designing and delivering in-house training sessions, and for running the BIALL Training the Trainer seminar for the last three years. The aim of this article is threefold: to explore the rationale for providing training; to examine the groundwork and preparation necessary to create the right training culture; and to offer practical guidance on how to deliver successful training activities.

In this article, which is a summary of his presentation at the 38th BIALL Annual Study Conference held in Sheffield in June 2007, James Mullan provides an account of how the Content Team at CMS Cameron McKenna implemented LawPort and the issues they faced from the initial pilot to completion of the project.

This article by Paulette Storey describes the sources of information produced by the central Information Department of Citizens Advice. They are available to advisers, many of them volunteers, working in the various local bureaux across the country and dealing face-to-face and on the phone, with a huge variety of enquiries. Paulette explains how the databases are structured, their content and how the information within them is written and obtained.

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.

Rob Brown gave the opening presentation at the BIALL Conference and filled us all with confidence on how to network at either a social or business event. He gave lots of helpful hints on how to prepare for an event, whom to approach on entering a room and then ten practical tips on how to behave at the event to ensure successful networking.

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.

This is the latest report analysing the results of the Society of Legal Scholars and BIALL Survey. It has been written by Peter Clinch, Senior Subject Librarian for Law, Cardiff University

David Byrne - Head of Information at BT Legal - explains that within the commercial, legal and regulatory division of BT, their approach to knowledge management is to introduce cultural change whereby knowledge capture and re-use are subordinate to the prime goals of revenue generation and competitiveness. He discusses the innovative methods used for building effective knowledge-sharing relationships including using the “best of the rest”; ensuring that the right technology is in place; measuring value; collaboration and creating the “Sticky Organisation”.

This article by Rob Martin addresses the issue of effectively managing the searching of enterprise information systems in law firms. It discusses the relative merits of federated, enterprise and integrated search and includes a case study of the combined solution adopted by City law firm, Ashurst.

Diane Raper describes the ongoing project at the University of Kent to upgrade the free Lawlinks portal established nearly ten years ago by Sarah Carter. The emphasis is on ensuring linking is working, establishing new links, and generally making the site more user-friendly, both to Kent law students and the outside world.

Diane Gwynne-Smith writes about the project, which she managed, to create the most comprehensive and freely available online database of materials on social care. It can be found at: www.scie-socialcareonline.org.uk

This article by Ivo Vogel and Dr Jochen Haug of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin describes an ambitious project to build a portal to a huge legal information resource covering German primary and secondary legal sources currently available on the internet. It will act as the first port of call for all legal researchers and it is hoped to extend the project to include hard copy sources eventually.

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 this article Chris Wallis examines some of the recent and impending developments in technology for managing legal information – in all its various guises. He looks in some detail at the facilities offered by Microsoft Sharepoint and tries to identify its USPs.

Philip Leith, who is a trustee of BAILII, explains its origins in the Society for Computers and Law's suggestion that the government should build a computerised database of English law, to its role today as a major free resource for legal information. He discusses the Australian model, AustLII; describes the current database and considers the interaction between legal publishers and addedvalue and free legal sources both now and in the future.

This study by Dragomir Cosanici provides a bibliometric, comparative study of the citation practices of the state supreme courts in the common law jurisdictions of Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan and Ohio, USA during a recent ten-year span (1994–2004). It focuses on the type of legal materials most frequently cited as authority, examining the importance of both primary and secondary sources. It specifically analyses the growing usage of electronic citations by the four supreme courts.

Carol Tullo, Director of the Office of Public Sector Information, explains what comprises public sector information and how her office is planning to promote the re-use of such information, to the benefit of the citizens of this country via sophisticated web technologies.

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.