This article by Jules Winterton, CEO of BAILII, is an expanded version of the presentation he delivered as the Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture 2022. The article briefly recounts the history of the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) and its achievements, the features of the service and the challenges of publishing judgments. It sets BAILII in the context of recent government initiatives and outlines plans for the future of BAILII.

This article, written by Jake Hearn, seeks to define and reevaluate artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of the corporate legal world. The article explores some of the opportunities on offer to information professionals to ensure that the profession continues to grow within the economic, cultural and professional context it is situated.

This paper is written by Gineke Wiggers, Suzan Verberne and Gerrit-Jan Zwenne and examines citations in legal documents in the context of bibliometric-enhanced legal information retrieval. It is suggested that users of legal information retrieval systems wish to see both scholarly and non-scholarly information, and legal information retrieval systems are developed to be used by both scholarly and non-scholarly users. Since the use of citations in building arguments plays an important role in the legal domain, bibliometric information (such as citations) is an instrument to enhance legal information retrieval systems. This paper examines, through literature and data analysis, whether a bibliometric-enhanced ranking for legal information retrieval should consider both scholarly and nonscholarly publications, and whether this ranking could serve both user groups, or whether a distinction needs to be made. Their literature analysis suggests that for legal documents, there is no strict separation between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. There is no clear mark by which the two groups can be separated, and in as far as a distinction can be made, literature shows that both scholars and practitioners (non-scholars) use both types. They perform a data analysis to analyze this finding for legal information retrieval in practice, using citation and usage data from a legal search engine in the Netherlands. They first create a method to classify legal documents as either scholarly or non-scholarly based on criteria found in the literature. We then semi- automatically analyze a set of seed documents and register by what (type of) documents they are cited. This resulted in a set of 52 cited (seed) documents and 3086 citing documents. Based on the affiliation of users of the search engine, we analyzed the relation between user group and document type. The authors’ data analysis confirms the literature analysis and shows much crosscitations between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. In addition, we find that scholarly users often open non-scholarly documents and vice versa. Our results suggest that for use in legal information retrieval systems citations in legal documents measure part of a broad scope of impact, or relevance, on the entire legal field. This means that for bibliometric-enhanced ranking in legal information retrieval, both scholarly and non-scholarly documents should be considered. The disregard by both scholarly and non-scholarly users of the distinction between scholarly and non-scholarly publications also suggests that the affiliation of the user is not likely a suitable factor to differentiate rankings on. The data in combination with literature suggests that a differentiation on user intent might be more suitable.

In recent years, the company called CB Resourcing has established itself in the recruitment business and regularly advertises for positions in the knowledge management, business research, legal tech and law librarianship worlds. In this short article one of the Directors of CB Resourcing, Simon Burton, offers some thoughts about the recruitment business, the current state of the market and describes the services that are provided by the company. The article has been written in the form of an interview with questions posed by the editor of this journal and answers given by Simon Burton.