Historically, civil justice has been conceived as a concentration of non–criminal matters, including several heterogeneous procedures, and that is the main reason why it has been subject of study in several countries in Latin America where procedure reforms are being designed, implemented or evaluated. Santiago Pereira Campos examines justice systems in Latin America in collaboration with Alejandra Pírez Ledesma who worked with him on this article.

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 the article Rosemary Auchmuty discusses the nature of, and the approach to, her research into the life of Gwyneth Bebb who in 1913 challenged the Law Society over their refusal to admit women to the solicitors' profession.

This article developed from a talk delivered by the authors, Timonie Green and Diane Miller, at the BIALL Annual Conference in June 2018, whereby they looked at how the Library and Information Services in both of their firms have managed a move to agile working. Withers, at the time, were deep in preparations for the move, whilst Gowling WLG had been working agilely for some time. The hope is that by telling these stories, and talking about the issues encountered, some pointers and ideas can be given to other firms facing the challenge.

Professor Tony Smith was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1947. He completed his LLB and LLM at Canterbury University, interspersed with a short-lived sortie into legal work with the Treasury. It was during these formative years that he acquired the deep interest in criminal law and its social and constitutional ramifications that has underpinned his whole career, and which gained him numerous academic advances, culminating in his chair of Criminal and Public Law at Cambridge University in 1996. He is currently Professor of Law at Victoria University, Wellington. This article is written by Lesley Dingle and is based on her interviews with Professor Smith which have been incorporated into the Eminent Scholars Archive at Cambridge.

Penny Bailey recounts the challenges she has met and dealt with in her unusual progression from a law librarian to running her own software company, Bailey Solutions.

This article by Allie Lustigman gives recommendations for creating a knowledge business strategy. The steps outlined are based upon the premise of using a strategy to review the information service and formulate a clear plan for the future function, particularly in terms of expanding the service; however, they can be applied to differing types of strategies. The article looks at various methods in which a review can be carried out and then outlines the strategy document itself, summarising the different sections that make up the document. Additionally, this article looks into the uses and benefits of creating a business strategy for the information professional.

This issue of LIM has a theme of Scottish legal information and David Hart the highly respected and long-standing (ex) Scottish law librarian, kindly agreed to talk to the Editor about his long career on law librarianship and his involvement with BIALL

Emily Allbon recounts her experiences in integrating social networking tools into her work with law students and, in particular, how she has integrated them with her prize-winning portal – Lawbore. She also documents her use of personal response systems in her teaching sessions.

In this article Cheryl Caballero, Erica Smith and Rosalind Guldner, members of the Ontario Legislative Assembly indexing team, describe the challenges of indexing legislative text and how they set about meeting them. A version of their article was originally published in The Indexer in June 2015*.

The impact of the Covid 19 lockdown of Western countries has had extensive coverage, but for other countries, like Myanmar, little information has been shared in the Western media. Yet the impact on everyday activities there has been just as great, including closure of workplaces and universities, the wearing of masks, and restrictions on travellers from outside Myanmar. When a planned programme of face-to-face legal research teaching in May 2020 could not be offered, another means had to be found to deliver a course which had been successfully introduced the previous year. In this article Ruth Bird outlines how the course went ahead even though she was in lockdown in Melbourne, while her colleagues and participants were locked down in Yangon.

Developing an enquiries tracking database can provide library services managers with data about how their services are being used and by whom. The software should to be configured to the requirements of the individual team in order to provide actionable data to help predict future needs and connect users with the right services. This article, written by Jas Breslin, follows one firm's journey to identify and roll-out a new research tracking system, Quest, under tight time constraints.

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.

In this article Sara Berry provides an account of some of the history relating to the Advocates Library in Edinburgh. She explains how the Advocates Library played a key role in the Scottish Enlightenment and acted as Scotland's national library up to the foundation of the National Library of Scotland in 1925. The article also looks at the library's integral role in supporting Faculty Members and the Scottish justice system through history to modern day. The last section looks at some of the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on Members, library staff and working practices.

This article and the previous one published in this issue of LIM are derived from a joint talk given at the BIALL Annual Conference 2017, which was held in Manchester. The title of the conference was ‘Together or apart? Effective ways of working’ and this talk described the collaboration between Shell's Legal Librarian, Hilary Smith, and Miriam Davies, Head of Library & Information at Norton Rose Fulbright, to provide an enquiry service to Shell's legal community. The service subsequently developed to include other law firms on Shell's legal panel. Topics covered include understanding the information needs of in-house lawyers, types of queries received, why involve law firms in providing such a service, the concept of added value and its importance in the client-law firm relationship, the setting up of the service, how it works in practice, how it is being used and key take away messages. In this article Miriam Davies takes a view from the law firm perspective.

Faced with a fragmentation of publishers' portfolios in Germany, the librarian Martina Kuth was interviewed about the challenges to grant a user-oriented library collection in a large commercial law firm like CMS Hasche Sigle.

‘Embedded librarianship’ has been on the rise in the legal sector since the early 2000s, but what is it and why has it become so popular? This article, written by Peter Wilson and Cosmo Anderson, aims to open up the wider conversations around embedded librarianship through a combination of the authors' practical experience and original research of librarians in UK and Irish law firms.

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.