Daniel Harrison, professional support lawyer, and Lisa Bunker, senior information officer, at Clifford Chance LLP explain why competition law research is so heavily based on European Union (EU) law and briefly describe the organisational framework and where to find key documents.

Lawyers are threatened as never before by the commoditisation of services and the automation of legal advice. Information professionals have been facing such threats for years. In this keynote article, Tim Buckley Owen asks whether it is time to make common cause?

I came to Thailand 18 months ago. An amazing opportunity had arisen to work in Bangkok and as my ‘other half’ was also being transferred, off we set. The contract was to work in our Bangkok office for 2/3 years in a regional role supplying commercial information and research to the five Asian offices and, of course, experience the life of another country.

The South African law library holds a similar function to that of its English counterpart. It provides a primary source to describe the law and how it has changed and grown over time. South African attorneys fulfil a similar role to solicitors and South African advocates can be equated with barristers. While attorneys have recently gained rights of audience in the High Court, most attorneys continue to brief advocates in complex matters due to their specialised knowledge and skills.

Bennett Graff, senior acquisitions editor at Gale, reviews the origins and current composition of The Making of Modern Law, a series of individual collections of digitized primary sources devoted to legal history. This overview explores the rationale behind the development of these collections and the research needs that they meet.

Welcome to the summer issue of Legal Information Management (LIM) which celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL). Back in 1999, on Friday 16th April 1999 to be precise, a BIALL Council meeting took place that was held at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London. The minutes of that meeting record that,

On flight NW43 from Gatwick I am the excitable passenger in seat 22B glancing nervously at the permafrost several thousand feet below as we head rapidly over Greenland (?) for the USA. I am travelling (with much thanks to BIALL and AALL) towards the 94th AALL Meeting and Conference (my first) being held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I am due to speak in session H3 about the Social Science Information Gateway and the work led by IALS to develop the law section of the Internet Gateway (http://www.sosig.ac.uk/law).

First of all, apologies for the title. This article is based on a talk I was asked to give to the Welsh Law Librarians Group at their inaugural meeting. I was allocated the graveyard slot in the afternoon and it was intended to be something to make everyone wake up. There is nothing like suggesting librarians are no longer needed to do just that.The purpose of this piece is to look at developments in legal information provision — and information provision generally — over the past five to ten years.

One of the most satisfying aspects of editing a magazine such as Managing Information, is the gathering together of expertise to help people improve their abilities and the services they provide and to facilitate, through raised awareness and discussion, the development of solutions to issues. Just such an opportunity has presented itself over the past year in the form of the imminent implementation of EU Directive 29/2001.

This is very much a personal opinion on the potential demise of the traditional library (which some would argue has already gone). My aim was to reassure library and information professionals that there is a role left for our profession in the world of lawyers who are able to access information at their desks; a world which includes professional support lawyers and know how databases. This is no place for the fainthearted, and especially not for the stereotypical librarian – if such a creature exists. This article will only scratch the surface of some issues, so I welcome comments, feedback and downright disagreement – [email protected]

In recent years BIALL has informally addressed the question of a Code of Ethics for its members. Discussions have taken place in the Professional Standards and Development Committee, and the issue has been raised cursorily by Council in its occasional meetings. Hitherto, however, there has been no attempt at formally addressing the question of ethics specifically for law librarians in the UK or the Republic of Ireland.

Linda Holbeche discusses how knowledge and service industry organisations should change in recessionary periods and she explains the cycle of change.

Selecting my title to span two conference topics, this year's and last, I admit could have been a little tricky, but my inspiration in the end came from music and hopefully you too will see, as we progress through this presentation, just how much our profession can learn from the musicians.

Elaine Bird, the current Librarian of the Signet Library, describes the history and current activities of this library which forms part of one of the world's oldest legal professional bodies

In this article Loyita Worley describes the relationships between the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL) and its fellow organisations around the world. She looks at the way that BIALL has promoted law librarianship internationally and mentions some of the activities of the Association including its recent project work in Sierra Leone, as well as noting a few reminiscences along the way.

This paper is based on a presentation of the same title given by Jane Bradbury, Head of Knowledge and Information at the law firm Slaughter and May, at the inaugural seminar of the BIALL Knowledge Management Group on 9th May 2016. The article has been compiled by the other two authors, Jon Beaumont and Tim Barlow, and so not all of the opinions expressed are attributable to Jane. The authors are also indebted to Anne Ashdown, of recruitment firm tfpl, who presented at the same seminar on the subject of recruitment for legal knowledge management (KM) roles and whose observations are also incorporated in the article. The paper considers the increasing impact of KM on the work of library and information professionals in law firms. It discusses the related role of professional support lawyers (PSLs), the knowledge “hot topics” which are driving evolution of the profession, the transferability of information skills, and opportunities for development and career progression beyond the traditional boundaries of library and information management.

In this article Pattie Punch reflects on IALL's 34th Annual Course on International Law and Legal Information which was held at Statsbibliothek, Berlin from 20th to 24th September, 2015. The course was entitled ‘Within and in Between: German Legal Tradition in Times of Internationalization and Beyond’ and the work and content of the presentations made her consider what she values about the education of law librarians in the 21st Century. The course raised many questions in relation to a resilient education for law librarians. Since this course, the Brexit referendum in the UK has taken place and the author offers her thoughts about this change of direction and what it might mean for the profession.

Is Google a substitute for using known, authoritative websites for cases, legislation and other official information? Ian Hunter writes about the test searches that he carried out on Google and discusses the results he noted. In this exercise, consideration is given to whether the websites retrieved are authoritative and also attention is paid to Google's ranking of results.

This paper, by Richard Collier, reviews the dominant methodological and theoretical approaches that have shaped socio-legal scholarship on masculinities and law to date. It presents a flavour of contemporary work in the field and, looking specifically to the concerns of the ALS/British Library/SLSA socio-legal training day on sources and methods in Law, Gender and Sexuality, considers selected issues around methods and sources involved in analysing masculinities and law. The paper suggests work in this area has drawn on a diverse range of archives and content and that there is considerable variation in how legal scholarship has sought to approach the topic of masculinity.