In the 1760s a newly qualified apprentice to the King's Geographer hit upon the idea of cutting up maps for children to assemble as a geographical teaching aid. Dissected maps remain popular to this day in their evolved form as jigsaw puzzles. This article, written by Alison Million during the Covid-19 lockdown when jigsaws have exploded in popularity, looks at their history and at research projects which have established their cognitive benefits or have used them as an inexpensive non-digital tool. By considering papers written on librarians’ thinking styles and on personality it seeks to establish with the help of a short survey whether parallels might exist between the cognitive skillsets of the jigsaw puzzler and those of the librarian.

This article represents a summary of the parallel session that Barry Vickery presented to delegates at the 2019 BIALL Annual Conference in Bournemouth. There, his presentation was entitled: ‘A glance at the past and a glimpse of the future – How to learn from the past to make better decisions in the future’. As BIALL was celebrating its 50th anniversary, Barry took the opportunity to look back at the last fifty years to highlight people and companies that had made good decisions and those that had made bad ones. He went on to explore different decision-making techniques that we could all utilise to help us to make more informed decisions in our daily life.

In recent years there has been an explosion of new ‘legal tech’ solutions on the market claiming to solve almost every problem or improve the efficiency of almost any process in a law firm. Alongside these new legal tech vendors are the traditional legal vendors offering enterprise solutions, and it can be challenging to identify, select and implement the right mix of solutions to solve your law firm's knowledge management (KM) needs. If you are thinking about or have been asked to introduce a new KM solution, it can be difficult to know where to get started, especially if you are in this position for the first time. This article, by Richard Tomlinson, explores some techniques and methodologies picked up over several years working in legal technology in big-law, to help you select and implement the best technology solutions for your firm.

Masoud Gerami, Managing Director of vLex Justis, and Aidan Hawes, Head of Commercial Development, discuss the development and launch of the new vLex Justis platform. They describe the process of making decisions behind the content and features available on the platform, and how these will be continually enhanced in the future. They also discuss the global circumstances the platform was launched within and share their goal of meeting customer needs in a future which will bring new ways of working.

On the 6 March 2020, after judging by a panel of celebrity judges and industry experts, the overall winner for the Justis International Law & Technology Writing Competition was announced as a student from the University of Bologna, alongside three Best in Category articles, all from UK universities. Winning articles focussed on the role of online courts, the question of responsibility around personal data, smart contracts, and the risks of bias in algorithmic decision making. The competition organisers, Dr Matthew Terrell and David Hand of vLex Justis, share their thoughts on this year's competition and their hopes for the next competition, alongside the winning articles.

Developing an enquiries tracking database can provide library services managers with data about how their services are being used and by whom. The software should to be configured to the requirements of the individual team in order to provide actionable data to help predict future needs and connect users with the right services. This article, written by Jas Breslin, follows one firm's journey to identify and roll-out a new research tracking system, Quest, under tight time constraints.

This paper follows up from a previous study on this topic and outlines the second part of a wider, two-part study on the information seeking behaviour (ISB) of law students. Exploratory work was outlined in a previous publication17 and there we 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 better understand the advantages and disadvantages of such, we extended our study to a wider cohort and employed more research techniques including a focus group. This final phase of our study was conducted between 2015 to 2017. Here our cohort included another set of law librarians (13) and a further 54 law students. We expanded our research tools to include 2 thematic questionnaires and a focus group exercise. Our findings discovered that law librarians were concerned with the intangibility of digital formats. Law students remained indifferent to this aspect and valued the speed, multi-tasking and near-ubiquitous accessibility attributes that electronic format use via mobile technologies provided. These learnings and more, with conclusions, are reported in the course of this paper written by Zaki Abbas, Andrew MacFarlane and Lyn Robinson.

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.

The impact of the Covid 19 lockdown of Western countries has had extensive coverage, but for other countries, like Myanmar, little information has been shared in the Western media. Yet the impact on everyday activities there has been just as great, including closure of workplaces and universities, the wearing of masks, and restrictions on travellers from outside Myanmar. When a planned programme of face-to-face legal research teaching in May 2020 could not be offered, another means had to be found to deliver a course which had been successfully introduced the previous year. In this article Ruth Bird outlines how the course went ahead even though she was in lockdown in Melbourne, while her colleagues and participants were locked down in Yangon.

In this article Michael Maher writes about the declining print needs for law libraries within UK law firms in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The article begins by looking at the initial financial impact Covid-19 had across UK law firms. The second part of the article covers how home-working patterns have become the preferable option to working in the office. Finally, the author takes a change management approach, addressing what information professionals need to do to best manage and embed the change so as to continue to play a key part of the future, post-pandemic, law firm business.

The pressure on the criminal justice system in England and Wales is mounting. Recent figures reveal that despite a rise in recorded crime, the number of defendants in court proceedings has been the lowest in 50 years. This indicates a crisis of access to criminal justice. Predictive policing and risk assessment programmes based on algorithmic decision making (ADM) offer a prospect of increasing efficiency of law enforcement, eliminating delays and cutting the costs. These technologies are already used in the UK for crime-mapping and facilitating decisions regarding prosecution of arrested individuals. In the US their deployment is much wider, covering also sentencing and parole applications.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a widely discussed topic in many fields including law. Legal studies scholars, particularly in the domain of technology and internet law, have expressed their hopes and concerns regarding AI. This project aims to study how Canada's courts have referred to AI, given the importance of the reasonings of justices to the policy makers who determine society's rules for the usage of AI in the future. Decisions from all levels of both Canada's provincial and federal courts are used as the data sources for this research. The findings indicate that there are four legal contexts in which AI has been referred to in the Canadian caselaw including: legal research, investment tax credits, trademarks and access to government records. In this article the authors use these findings to make suggestions for legal information management professionals on how to develop collections and reference services that are in line with the new information needs of their users regarding AI and the rule of law.

English justice was once as accessible as the air we breathe. The early Anglo-Saxons settled disputes effortlessly by bundling claimants into lakes and adjudicating by virtue of whether God intervened to rescue them from sinking.

This article by the LexisNexis Segment Marketing team explains the approach, methodology and findings of the LexisNexis Gross Legal Product (GLP) report, first presented at the BIALL's Virtual Conference in June 2020. The GLP is a quantitative measure of underlying demand for legal services in the UK, comprised of 250 individual metrics which serve as proxies for legal activity. The article outlines the methodology and sources used to build the GLP; headline findings for Q2 2020 YTD; and provides suggestions for how firm leaders and knowledge professionals could use the information in their work. The GLP Q2 model found that demand for legal activity has declined by 7% since the start of 2020.

Technological developments and scientific innovations have enhanced the way people live and work. Courts are places where people seek justice and millions of cases across the globe are examined every day, and judgments are delivered. The courts system in India is on a vast and complex scale. The application and dissemination of information in India has been spreading at a faster pace over the past few decades. This has set the stage for the computerisation of courts to enhance transparency and efficiency in the Indian judicial system. The Indian sub-continent is a highly populated nation and from 2007 the government of India began implementing the eCourts Project as a citizen-centric initiative for expeditious and affordable justice delivery. This article analyses the various dimensions involved in the eCourts process and explains its significance in the justice delivery system in India. In also looks at the various challenges of implementing such a vast system across judicial system of India.

This article is designed for law librarians based outside the United States. The paper, written by Marcia Zubrow, provides basic information about the United States legal system and its sources. This background foundation to the article is important in understanding how to effectively use the two major U.S. databases, Lexis and Westlaw. The author describes the contents of the two databases within the context of the background information. Search techniques, including advance searching strategies, are described.

The Squire Law Library has designed and run a series of popular escape room-style events, aimed at masters and undergraduate law students. Intended to prompt students to explore the full range of legal resources available to them, the games typically challenge participants to open a locked safe: relying on legal databases, the library catalogue and print materials to decipher a six-digit combination. This article, based on Lizz Edwards-Waller's presentation at the BIALL (virtual) conference 2020, reflects on the practicalities of running and promoting code-breaking events within the library and considers the benefits of this style of event in addition to, or instead of, more traditional law library orientation tours.

In our data-driven society, every piece of technology that connects us to the internet collects our personal data (any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person), building elaborate profiles on what we are doing, where we are, and even who we are. As data subjects (those about whom personal data are collected), we can no longer hide from data controllers (those who collect and determine what these data are used for). With every data breach and data sharing revelation from Cambridge Analytica to Google’s Project Nightingale, our personal data is becoming less personal, where data attached to our identity are no longer in our control and becomes harder for us to identify who is responsible.