The decisions of courts and tribunals, and the statutes that societies live under, are the building blocks to the rule of law. Access to this information for legal professionals can be difficult while access for the general public is often impossible. This article by Gavin Sheridan, the co-founder and CEO at Vizlegal, considers a first principles approach to the barriers to access, how the legal industry has adapted, how technology companies can address and improve it and how the future of legal information involves open access, open standards and innovation built on top of legal data.

England and Wales have no public law libraries, so how does the general public find legal information? This article, written by Abi Reader, Assistant Librarian at Certara Predictive Technologies, provides a starting point in understanding the availability of publicly available legal information. It explores the intersection of two austerity measures, cuts to legal aid and public library spending, through searching public library catalogues for primary sources of law. Public libraries provide computers and internet access to search free online legal information sites but overall provide limited access to print law reports. This article is based on research presented at the 54th Annual BIALL Conference.

Last year Jake Hearn, Vice Chair of the LIM editorial board, created an elective module on the core components of and types of roles within the legal information profession, which was offered to postgraduate students at City, University of London, with the module being hosted at City, University of London and The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple. Here Jake gives the reasons for creating the module and tells us how it all came together and how it has progressed since then.

The International Law Book Facility (ILBF) ships donated law books to organisations across the globe which require good quality legal publications. Since its inception in 2005 it has delivered over 80,000 books to more than 250 organisations in 56 countries. Here Katrina Crossley, the Chief Executive of the ILBF, explains why it is so important and how it works, giving some examples of how the project has eased the way for people training in the law in Africa. The importance of law librarians in all of this is discussed too. Katrina also outlines how ILBF has worked with BIALL in the course of its law librarian training schemes in Sierra Leone and Ghana, and will continue to do so in other countries in Africa as this is expanded.

The advancement of technology has drastically changed the way information is being stored in the law library. With current technology, many have found that legal information is easy to retrieve from federal or state government websites in Malaysia. But while federal legislation can be accessed via the internet, some of the law cannot be accessed for the public to review or download. Also, older law is unavailable from the federal gazette website, and it is crucial for the lawyer or law librarian to publicly access it. This paper, by Qudri Ali Abu Bakar, discusses the restriction of access to legal information and looks at some alternative ways of gaining full access to federal and state law in Malaysia.

This article is a summary of a parallel session delivered by Stephen Gregory at the BIALL Conference 2022. We may frequently work with amended legislation but have we ever stopped to think about the processes involved in identifying and implementing amendments? Drawing on experiences of working with government lawyers this article explores how government legal information professionals can assist in identifying candidates for consequential amendment. The complexities of searching for references to specific legislation provisions are described, providing some suggested search solutions. A risk-based approach is suggested. He concludes that by working collaboratively government information professionals may add significant value and benefit.

This paper, written by Gineke Wiggers, Suzan Verberne, Gerrit-Jan Zwenne and Wouter Van Loon, addresses the concept of ‘relevance’ in relation to legal information retrieval (IR). They investigate whether the conceptual framework of relevance in legal IR, as described by Van Opijnen and Santos in their paper published in 2017, can be confirmed in practice.1 The research is conducted with a user questionnaire in which users of a legal IR system had to choose which of two results they would like to see ranked higher for a query and were asked to provide a reason for their choice. To avoid questions with an obvious answer and extract as much information as possible about the reasoning process, the search results were chosen to differ on relevance factors from the literature, where one result scores high on one factor, and the other on another factor. The questionnaire had eleven pairs of search results. A total of 43 legal professionals participated consisting of 14 legal information specialists, 6 legal scholars and 23 legal practitioners. The results confirmed the existence of domain relevance as described in the theoretical framework by Van Opijnen and Santos as published in 2017.2 Based on the factors mentioned by the respondents, the authors of this paper concluded that document type, recency, level of depth, legal hierarchy, authority, usability and whether a document is annotated are factors of domain relevance that are largely independent of the task context. The authors also investigated whether different sub-groups of users of legal IR systems (legal information specialists who are searching for others, legal scholars and also for legal practitioners) differ in terms of the factors they consider in judging the relevance of legal documents outside of a task context. Using a PERMANOVA there was found to be no significant difference in the factors reported by these groups. At this moment there is no reason to treat these sub-groups differently in legal IR systems.

This article by Clare Brown is based on a presentation given at the BIALL Online Annual Conference in June 2021. It takes the form of a case study that illustrates how library and information professionals can control the flow of information so as to avoid users being overwhelmed by news.

This article by Isabelle Brenneur-Garel, President of Juriconnexion and its working group, ‘Journée’1, focuses on the Juriconnexion association's annual conference, held on 21 January 2021 by videoconference. The choice of topic was motivated by the recent pandemic: changes to legal information and work in times of crisis. How have professionals navigated this ongoing crisis? What coping strategies have they developed? What does the future hold? More than twenty speakers from academia, legal publishing, legal associations and networks, and the legal and legal-related professions shared their experiences with members of the working group.

The coronavirus pandemic has had a profound effect on the conduct of legal business generally, but nowhere perhaps more drastically than on the conduct of litigation in the courts. This article by Paul Magrath considers how the judiciary, court services and practitioners of England and Wales have been working together to continue to administer justice in spite of the restrictions necessitated by the pandemic, and the challenges that have been faced in managing court information and reporting court proceedings.

In this article Ian Hunter considers his experiences, learning points and recommendations on running an international law firm research service from home for 6 months, after being sent home at one hour's notice. In the article he considers working from home, including the psychological benefits of having a ‘journey’ to work, providing a research service and a library service, managing a team and the use of communications technology.

This article argues that a migration from print resources to electronic access is required to democratise access to legal information for lawyers, and that resource managers should seize this opportunity to ‘go digital’ while lawyers are more accepting of change and open to new technologies as a result of forced changes to working practices during the Covid-19 pandemic. The author, Jas Breslin, a law library professional with 20-plus years of experience, explains how the sector is now grasping the nettle.

The Covid-19 pandemic drastically changed the information landscape. For us it exponentially increased our workload and unequivocally demonstrated how much value we could add to the business. The skill set of information professionals is in demand like never before, changing many of our roles for the better. This article, written by Felicity Cross, discusses the effect the pandemic has had on her department and what that means for our profession as a whole.

This paper by Dr. Mohd Muzzammil concerns the legal information resources at the Supreme Court of India Judges’ Library (SCJL). The article is based on a survey conducted by the researcher as part of his PhD work. He describes the Court and the library collections that support the work of the SCJL, and notes that print legal information resources are used more than electronic resources. The study also realised that a significant percentage of the library budget is expended on subscriptions for journals.

Wolters Kluwer is a global provider of professional information, software solutions, and services for customers in more than 180 countries. It employs approximately 19,000 people worldwide and has annual revenues of €4.6 billion of which 89% are derived from digital products and services. The company's roots can be traced back to the nineteenth century and to the merger of four entrepreneurial, family-run Dutch publishing houses: Wolters, Noordhoff, Samsom, and Kluwer. Throughout its 184-year history, Wolters Kluwer has adapted to a significant amount of environmental, cultural, and technological change, not the least of which was digitalization. It expanded internationally through numerous acquisitions and moved deeper into data and analytics. The company's four operational divisions - Health, Tax & Accounting, Governance Risk & Compliance and Legal & Regulatory - now aim together to achieve goals under a strategy entitled Accelerating Our Value. Those goals are three-fold: to grow expert solutions, to advance deep domain expertise and to drive operational agility. Today Wolters Kluwer is a data-driven, highly customer-experience-focused organization that continues to apply advanced technologies to complex problems. The author, David Bartolone, VP and General Manager, for the International Group within Wolters Kluwer's Legal and Regulatory, U.S. unit, describes Wolters Kluwer's history as well as the current organizational structure, and vision for the future. In addition, he draws upon his recent experience to describe Wolters Kluwer's international legal business.

This article by Jill Henderson and Louise Young is based on their ‘Lightning Talk’ at the 2018 BIALL Conference and describes the recent current awareness project at Irwin Mitchell. It outlines each stage of the project from recognising there was a need to change and choosing the right product to enable that, through to gathering requirements, building searches and launching the new alerts. It goes through each stage in detail and outlines the lessons learnt to help others who may be considering a similar project.

This article, by Sarah Bracey and Tony Simmonds, explores professional and cultural challenges confronting two BIALL members involved in a project to enhance law library services in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It considers approaches to developing effectual supportive partnerships in a developing country context where the legal information ecosystem and provision of resource differ to an extent that all but inverts the familiar working world. The article traces the boundaries of what change is feasible in such a context, cautioning against over-ambition and advocating areas for future focus around staffing, co-ordination of donation programmes and digitisation of primary materials.

The 6th Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture was delivered by David Allen Green and took place on 8 June 2017 during the Annual Conference of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL) which was held in Manchester. His talk concerned libraries and public policy with particular reference to Brexit. He addressed the issues of how a debate like Brexit can be better informed and to what extent reliable legal and policy information makes any difference. In essence, he looks at how good information can help shape Brexit. This article is a later write-up from David's speaking notes. The lecture was, coincidentally, given on the same day as the general election.

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.

Free access to public legal information for the general public and professionals promotes justice and the rule of law. Presenters at the 2015 Law via the Internet conference discussed projects using the power of technology combined with expert human input to make information accessible, and to extract new information from large document collections. Although the scale is different, there are similarities in the ways in which indexers and informaticians explore meaning, develop standards and consider user needs to make information widely accessible. Glenda Browne reports on the conference.*