This article by Renê Francisco Hellman and Mariana Cesto aims to analyse how the New Civil Procedure Code will influence the Brazilian legal education system. The new Code is opposed to ‘surprise decisions’ and emphasizes the need for substantial opportunity to contradict the opponent's submissions. This will constrain judicial decision-making. On that basis, new challenges appear for teaching, and they must be faced and solved in order to make the new prescriptions effective. The proposal is to use an interdisciplinary approach to reformulate the legal education system. This would effectively provide better support to future lawyers regarding their development, making them better qualified to operate within the legal system.

In this article, James Mullan addresses the recent trend relating legal project management (LPM) by law firms and assesses the long term potential for this concept. In addition, he seeks to identify how those in the law library and information profession can play a significant role in its introduction and development within a firm.

This article by Katie Woolf, formerly of the Government Knowledge and Information Network, looks at the new UK Government strategy for knowledge and information (KIM). Led by the Knowledge Council, the strategy sets out the principles and actions government must take to develop the capability it needs to manage corporate knowledge and information as the key business assets they are. It discusses how the strategy will be achieved through a departmental delivery model, the relationship of the strategy with the Information Assurance agenda post data loss scandals, and the need for senior leader engagement to be the driving force to building a culture that values KIM.

Professions of all types are being affected by globalisation of markets and the information technology revolution. The information world is developing rapidly and increasing numbers of people are being attracted to working within this modern sphere, many of whom have had no formal information training. Does this mean that a library and information qualification is no longer a requirement and if so why As an information graduate in the modern information world, I have two choices. I can take each day as it comes and become a pawn in a high stakes chess game played by others or I can take individual responsibility and develop my own career.

The Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture 2019 was delivered at the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians’ Annual Conference by Brenda Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond, DBE,1 the President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. Lady Hale reflected upon some of the major changes in the law and access to justice since she was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge and Willi Steiner was Law Librarian at the Squire Law Library. Her lecture coincided with BIALL's fiftieth anniversary year and focused on five significant developments: the explosion of judicial review of administrative action, the arrival of EU law, the growth of international human rights law, the recognition of gender and other equality, and devolution and the evolution of a new constitutional role for the courts.

Michael Chapman, who is a Senior Lecturer at the Inns of Court School of Law, writes about how the BVC is delivered to over 500 full-time students each year, using state of the art technology and e-learning methods which are a far cry from traditional teaching methods. This article is a companion to Peter Clinch's article on the BVC which also appears in this issue.

This article by Allie Lustigman argues that information professionals should have a significant involvement in their firm's intranets or portals and discusses how our skills can be used in this area. It outlines, with clear examples, the different spheres that we can become involved with in relation to intranets, which include; information organisation and search, taking ownership of intranet pages and spaces, allowing current awareness and news to flow through intranets, and training.

Jack Diggle from Prince OMC provides an overview of the world of outsourcing legal services. He explains the various methods of outsourcing and provides a glossary of the terms involved. He tells us what is happening in the UK in terms of outsourcing legal information work and explains how the concept of outsourcing began.

This opinion article, by Channarong Intahchomphoo and Christian Tschirhart, explains the evolution of data and how it becomes useful information and then insightful knowledge. In the current era we are witnessing a high increase in the development and adaptation of artificial intelligence (AI) in society. AI technologies have the ability to process large volumes of data and information to help in finding insightful knowledge. However, AI is not perfect and there are ethical concerns, particularly when unintended negative consequences result from it; this paper also discusses ethical concerns currently confronting our society related to the freedom of expression and hate speech issues with AI. Importantly, this paper notes that governments are working to find ways to regulate social media and internet companies through legal channels as governments are no longer confident in the ability of social media and internet companies to self-regulate and thereby to guide society on what content is right or wrong. This is a critical new development in internet and AI governance that information and technology professionals and public and private organizations need to monitor closely the situation as it evolves.

The subject of this article is not strictly limited to law librarianship but I do feel that it is a topic that a large number of us are exposed to and for which I myself initially had little guidance. In the hard financial climate that we have been experiencing recently, negotiating good contract renewals has become a vital skill for any legal information professional.

In this article, Masoud Gerami, Managing Director, and Aidan Hawes, Head of Commercial Development, offer an exploration of the history of Justis, and the influence the company has had on the delivery of legal information over its 30-year history. They describe the development of technology over this time, from the rise of optical media through to the features offered by today's online legal research technology, focusing on Justis’ key milestones over this period. They discuss the range of innovations Justis has been responsible for, the changes in the legal research industry, and offer an insight into the future aspirations of the company.

In this, the third of a trilogy of articles for LIM written by Raj Kumar Bhardwaj, the author addresses the move from print to digital legal information within the Indian judicial system. He describes briefly the historical development of the legal system and the enormous backlog of cases that are pending throughout the court structure, before turning attention to the role of ICT in the legal system and the moves under way to create a more efficient electronic administration for the judiciary in India.

In May 2003, I had the task of distributing the notice of Willi Steiner's death to colleagues, which is reproduced below. On 27 May an obituary appeared in the Times written by Willi's brother Francis. This article is an opportunity to mark Willi's passing with a substantial account of his career and contribution to the profession of law librarianship and to the process of research and scholarship in law. I would like to thank David Wills, Squire Law Librarian, and Paul Norman of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Library for their assistance.

This paper by Professor Gillian Triggs seeks to explore whether the traditional principles of public international law are ‘fit for purpose’ in responding to such contemporary threats to collective security by reference to three issues: the regulation of the use of force; the need to balance the sovereign rights of states with humanitarian concerns; and the relationship between human rights and the orthodox rules applicable to prisoners of war and security detainees.

Guy Holborn revisits the research he carried out in preparing the chapter on law libraries from 1850 to 2000 in the Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. Much of the material he gathered was not included in the chapter as published for reasons of space. Drawing from both the previously published chapter and the unpublished material, he selects four themes relevant to BIALL in its 50th anniversary year: legal education and law libraries, the development of law firms and their information services, the content of law libraries and the information needs of the profession, and the emergence of the professional law librarian.

Knowledge professionals are often responsible for document automation projects in law firms and in-house legal departments. This article by Robert Lankester is written to provide insight for a wide range of knowledge professionals (in fact anyone curious about document automation), from those for whom it is a new concept to the experienced document automation specialist. First is a discussion of what document automation is (and is not), and the benefits for knowledge management (KM). The main focus of the article is guidance on project implementation, with a specific focus on resourcing. Specific tips for preparing a document for automation and alternative project ideas are included. The article concludes that document automation is a powerful tool for internal knowledge development, enabling deeper collaboration with clients and changing the way legal services are delivered. Resourcing document automation can be approached in a number of ways but whatever the approach, the key is to ensure that business engagement is appropriately catered for.

A presentation about collaboration, itself the product of a collaboration, looking at a collaborative project as an example of the value of people from different teams working together! That was Peter Griffith and Pete Smith at the BIALL Conference 2014 in Glasgow, a conference which took as its theme ‘law as a business.’ They discuss the challenges with reference to the LawSync project.

“Wales, it has to be said, has come a very long way in a short time.” was the opening line by Sir David Lloyd Jones in his speech on, “The Law Commission and Law Reform in a Devolved Wales” to the Wales Governance Centre Annual Lecture in Aberystwyth in March 2013.1 This brief overview by Lillian Stevenson attempts to discuss this statement using selected documents published after the 2011 referendum in which the people of Wales voted in favour of extending the law making powers of the National Assembly.

In this article, based on a presentation at the BIALL Annual Conference in 2019, Renae Satterley and Adam Woellhaf discuss the methodology and potential effectiveness of using contingent valuation surveys in law libraries. Their approach is based on the Middle Temple Library's experience of running such a survey in 2018.

In the current economic climate, many law librarians are having to deal with enquiries relating to various aspects of insolvency law with which they may not be familiar. Richard Fergusson, an insolvency specialist at Keeble Hawson in Leeds, has written an overview of the different types of insolvency and the processes involved in each.