Mergers and acquisitions (M&A), leveraged finance and capital markets are important markets for professional advisory firms such as investment banks, financial sector law firms and the ‘Big 4’ consultancies. While market totals are widely published in free sources, finding both sub-totals and lists of deals is more difficult and usually requires access to paid-for sources. In this article Ian Hunter considers the best paid-for and free sources and looks at the caveats in relying on them. In essence, he asks ‘why don't the sources agree?’ and provides a ‘jargon buster’ and a critique of sources in M&A, leveraged finance and capital markets.

In this article Lisa Davies, Access Librarian at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, reports on a recent initiative to create online tutorials to improve the legal information skills of postgraduate researchers. She describes the aims of the project, outlines the steps that were taken to create the new training resources, details the content of the tutorials, looks back on the main challenges faced and considers plans for the future.

This paper by Ruth Frendo, which is based on her presentation given at the training day on ‘Socio-Legal Sources and Methods in International Law’ which was held at IALS on 25 November 2016, provides an overview of the history and development of the International Law Association and gives an account of the archives of the organisation that are held at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London.

The concepts of agile working, the emergence of the entreployee and generational issues: are these concepts game changers or just gimmicks? Jackie Fishleigh examines new ways of office working in the commercial and information environments. Her thoughts are informed and inspired in part by her attendance at the London Law Expo, Europe's largest senior legal management conference and exhibition, which took place on 13th October 2015.

In this short article Rónán Kennedy explores fundamental issues surrounding the use of algorithms in the context of the rule of law in our society. He states, ‘The issues that are buried in these systems should be a matter of serious concern for law and lawyers as we try to protect fundamental values in the 21st century, and we try to properly represent our clients’ interests against systems errors that we cannot easily identify’.*

This article details a small project undertaken by Information Skills Advisers at London South Bank University to increase student engagement in lecture theatre settings through the use of a web-based audience response system (ARS), Mentimeter. Supporting the School of Law, librarians delivered an interactive OSCOLA referencing session to a large capacity lecture theatre. A previous session was redesigned to increase student engagement and active learning utilising interactive quiz questions which students answered using mobile devices. The majority of feedback from students and staff who participated in this pilot project was positive and showed an increase in student engagement. This article is based on the presentation, ‘Have You Voted?: Teaching OSCOLA with Mentimeter’ delivered at the BIALL Annual Conference 2017. It will examine the process of adapting a lecture to include interactive content using an ARS, and will discuss the outcomes of the pilot session and explore benefits and challenges inherent in using technology of this type in a large classroom.

Professor Tony Smith was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1947. He completed his LLB and LLM at Canterbury University, interspersed with a short-lived sortie into legal work with the Treasury. It was during these formative years that he acquired the deep interest in criminal law and its social and constitutional ramifications that has underpinned his whole career, and which gained him numerous academic advances, culminating in his chair of Criminal and Public Law at Cambridge University in 1996. He is currently Professor of Law at Victoria University, Wellington. This article is written by Lesley Dingle and is based on her interviews with Professor Smith which have been incorporated into the Eminent Scholars Archive at Cambridge.

The BIALL annual law firm survey was launched in October 2016. The aim was to understand standard practice across the law firm library sector and to benchmark certain aspects of a library's service against other firms, providing a year-on-year comparison of how the profession is changing. This is an overview of how the survey came about and a summary of the key findings from the first year's results. It was written by the Working Group members. The full survey results can be found on the BIALL website1.

Formalised reflective learning systems are one of the most effective and yet underutilised methods of learning. This article, written by Hélène Russell, aims to give you the tools to use after action reviews (AAR) for your information management (IM) and knowledge management (KM) projects so you can learn from your experiences for greater success in the future and also to lead AAR meetings for other professionals within your organisation, to help increase their experiential learning.

The proliferation of digital legal resources over recent years has profoundly changed the way in which lawyers carry out legal research. Law librarians have had to adapt rapidly to these new ‘disruptive technologies’ and have had to develop new ways to train their users in how to carry out the most effective legal search. As a consequence, training has become an increasingly important role of a law librarian. The literature shows that these issues have been much discussed, but often confined to either the academic sector, or to the role of the law librarian in a law firm. Over the past few years, the concept of information literacy has increasingly been seen as a way of developing more effective legal research training programmes. This study, conducted by Steve Mishkin*, examines the views of law librarians working in both the academic and non-academic sectors, regarding how to deliver legal research training most effectively. The study concludes by recommending greater cooperation between academic and non-academic law librarians and suggests that both need to make the case for the benefits of legal research training, in order to win support from their management for better resourced programmes. It also suggests that the quality of legal research training will be improved if law librarians themselves are provided with training, on how to deliver it most effectively.

This article written by Hélène Russell aims to look at the measurement of Knowledge projects and activities in a simple, practical way, with the aim of helping busy law firm librarians understand whether their various Knowledge Management (KM) projects and activities are having a positive effect and are value for money in a general sense. Be forewarned: the benefits of KM are often intangible and the way that KM affects tangibles can be complex, so measurement is difficult. However, that does not mean that you cannot approximate an answer which is useful for informing business decisions.

This paper is based on a parallel session presented at the BIALL Conference 2017 by Corryn Walker. The content focusses on a project undertaken by Manchester Metropolitan University Library during 2015/2016 to revamp their ‘Welcome and Induction’ programme. The project was coordinated by Corryn Walker and Elaine Cooke, both Deputy Library Services Managers. The article covers the background to, and motivation behind the project, its aims and objectives and the changes made to improve how the library welcomes new students to the service.

Barristers need information. They need it to defend their clients by presenting their case in court. Some of the information they need is to be found in a book; some is to be found on a database. Choices made by the barristers and the rationale for these choices form the basis for what is to follow, as Ruth Fay explains. In this piece of research, a lack of a control group meant that no firm conclusions could be drawn. However, some interesting findings emerged in terms of how the library was used. A number of recommendations were proposed. For the most part, they centred on practical and immediate rethinks with encouragement towards the ushering in of a new culture.

This paper outlines the first part of a wider, two-part study on the information behaviour of law students. The authors are Zaki Abbas, Andrew MacFarlane and Lyn Robinson. The background and motivation for the study have been described in a previous publication1 which reports the results of interviews with three academic law librarians. Our initial work found that although mobile technologies offered benefits to law students seeking information for their academic studies, there was concern from law librarians that the use of electronic resources via both non-mobile and mobile interfaces resulted in a loss of skills required for information retrieval due to the increasing capabilities of electronic resources’ search interfaces. To gain more insight into how law students were using mobile information resources, and to further understand the advantages and disadvantages of such resources, we extended our study to a wider cohort. This second phase, of our first part study, was conducted over two years (2013–2015). During this time, we carried out interviews with thirteen law librarians and fielded both quantitative and qualitative questionnaires to 36 law students. We also conducted a greater review of literature and examined several existing information-seeking models. We used the results of the research from this phase of study, together with the knowledge from the literature to propose a novel information-seeking behaviour (ISB) model for law students. These findings are reported within this paper. The second part of this research will look at expanding our research cohort to cover a wider audience throughout the UK and use a focus group to validate our proposed model. This will be reported in a following paper.

This is the latest report analysing the results of the Society of Legal Scholars and BIALL Survey. It has been written by David Gee, Deputy Librarian at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Increasing access to digital works and the proliferation of digital genres has changed the way in which we conceive of information, and particularly legal information, including how it is represented within legal citation practice. This article, written by Melissa Castan and Kate Galloway, contributes to the discourse around legal citation in two ways. It first provides a theoretical justification for citation practice as an element of legal information management crucial to effective scholarship, including knowledge creation and dissemination. Secondly, and based on this theoretical foundation, it identifies the challenges facing existing legal citation practice in the face of new media, new representations of legal scholarship, and new objectives for citation practice. Finally, in this article we distil foundation principles for citation to integrate these diverse elements. To illustrate the application of these principles, the article closes with suggested citation practices designed to enhance the existing framework in this digital landscape.