Michael Prichard was born before the Second World War and lived through the bombing and destruction of much of London. When he entered university in 1945, King's College London had reoccupied its old quarters in the badly-damaged Somerset House, and along with LSE and UCL had pooled teaching resources to overcome staff shortages and accommodation damage. This inadvertently gave Michael a rich pool of mentors upon which to found his career, and who served him well in later years. He entered Queens’ College Cambridge in 1948 and experienced the unique post-war phenomena of the “returning warriors”, which continued, along with the “weekenders”, when he became a fellow at Gonville & Caius in 1950. Here he has remained, and is still a Fellow, seventy years later. His legacy is a fund of memories of a life-long journey through changing landscapes of legal research, teaching, and college and faculty administration. Lesley Dingle first interviewed Michael for the Eminent Scholars Archive in 2012, where his biography and general academic reminiscences are set forth. She now revisits aspects of these, following a conversation she had with David Yale for ESA in November 2019. David was Michael's career-long colleague, and his interview shone new light on their decades of joint endeavour unravelling the development of maritime law in the British Isles. Shortly after David's reminder of the magnitude of their project, an encounter with Professor David Ibbetson, and most recently a meeting with Michael, now in his 93rd year, spurred the author on to summarise particular aspects of Michael's varied research projects. In the process, she will emphasise the overall sense of adventure, and enjoyment - in short “fun”, with which he explored the history and jurisdictional intricacies of the Admiralty Court (jointly with David Yale), presented his enlightened insights into the evolution of aspects of tort law, and explained his research of the few esoteric conundrums in which a retiree was able to indulge.

The second BIALL Law Firm Library Survey was launched in December 2019. The aim of the survey is to understand standard practice across the law firm library sector and to allow firms to benchmark certain aspects of the library's service against industry averages. This article contains a summary of the results with comparisons, where possible, to results from the previous survey (2015/16). The full survey results can be found on the BIALL website.

This paper examines peer-reviewed publications to learn about the relationships between artificial intelligence (AI) and the human race. For this systematic review, papers were collected from three academic databases: Scopus, Web of Science, and Academic Search Complete. From 1,222 papers reviewed, 36 papers were included. The findings indicate that there are four relationships between AI and race (i). AI causes unequal opportunities for people from certain racial groups, (ii). AI helps to detect racial discrimination, (iii). AI is applied to study health conditions of specific racial population groups, and (iv). AI is used to study demographics and facial images of people from different racial backgrounds. To widen the knowledge related to AI and race, all four finding categories in this review included supplementary studies as lessons learned for legal information management research. The authors, Channarong Intahchomphoo and Odd Erik Gundersen, use these findings to discuss how AI could impact libraries and how legal information management professionals might have to cope with the problem of biased AI.

Bailey Solutions is a leading provider of library management software to the legal sector. Penny Bailey, Managing Director of Bailey Solutions, traces the history of the company from before its incorporation in the 1990s to the current year. The company has experienced both economic recessions and up turns. Penny will discuss what helps Bailey Solutions to survive and the lasting values that she attributes to its success.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Smart contracts, which were once theorised, are now somewhat realised, thanks to recent developments in distributed ledger technology. Yet, these self-executing agreements written in code are not a panacea to businesses’ and individuals’ contracting woes. It is argued that smart contracts worsen existing power asymmetries between contracting parties, thus, fallbacks must be provided for.

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.