Smartphones have quickly become a key part of our daily lives. Over 70 percent of people in the UK own such a device and law students are no exception to this far-reaching trend1. The use of these devices has posed some significant questions on the extent of their impact on information seeking behaviour and in relation to information delivery of resources. Zaki Abbas, Andrew MacFarlane and Ayşe Göker, who have recently begun a research project together, seek to not only examine the information seeking behaviours (ISBs) of law students using their Smartphones for academic information retrieval, but also to investigate perspectives from subject law librarians from Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) throughout the UK. There is an impression that students tend to find Smartphones more appealing for their information seeking needs compared to the professional resources and services, such as virtual libraries, which their HEI have already invested in. The result leads to a deep concern from subject librarians that students may be at risk from weakening research skills as well as relying too much on poor information sources not specifically designed to meet their information needs within the academic context5. The authors also suggest that information service providers to be more pro-active in providing information to students through more user-friendly interfaces as well as capitalise on the growing use of the Smartphone as a means to deliver their product4,5,6,15.

Helen Young, the information Librarian (Law & Official Publications) at the University of Leicester, reports on the results of one extra element in the BIALL/SPTL Survey, designed to acquire further information about academic law librarians.

Susanna Winter from Baker & McKenzie considers the key issues which will affect law firm information services in the 21st Century. These include the use of technology, including the rise of so-called social networking and Web 2.0 tools; the impact of the Google-generation; the structure of information units; and the changing place of librarians within the law firm structure as a whole.

In a world where articles and tweets are discussing how artificial intelligence technology will replace humans, including lawyers and their support functions in firms, it can be hard to understand what the future holds. This article, written by Alex Smith, is based on his presentation at the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians conference in Dublin 2016 and looks at demystifying the emerging technology boom and identifies the expertise needed to make these tools work and be deployed in law firms. The article then looks at the skills and expertise of the knowledge and information teams, based in law firms, and suggests how they are ideally placed to lead these challenges as a result of their domain expertise and their existing, well defined skills that are essential to this new generation of technology. The article looks at the new technical environment, the emerging areas of products and legal problems, the skills needed for the new roles that this revolution is creating and how this could fit into a reimagined knowledge team.

In this article Peter Charlish addresses the controversial issue of the use of performance enhancing drugs in sport. He looks at the legal basis for regulation via the World Anti-Doping Code and the nature of a sports participant's relationship with their governing body and the anti-doping organisations. He explains in the context of proportionality, the measures designed to combat doping in sport; the importance to the Code of the central principle of strict liability. Also, he highlights the use of non-analytical positives as a further method of detection of doping violations, whilst taking consideration of the impact of these measures on the human rights of participants.

In this article Susan Alcock examines the issues relating to outsourcing of legal information services. She reflects the many concerns felt within the industry and offers many points-of-view that have been collected from those working in the field as in-house law librarians and legal information professionals.

It is a very great honour to be invited to give this lecture in memory of Willi Steiner. I was not privileged to know him personally but I have long been aware of the enormous contribution that he made to the development of the Squire Library in Cambridge and the library of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, of which I have been a grateful user for many years. I am also very aware of Willi's contribution to legal scholarship in general and in particular to comparative law. His work on the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals is just one example. I hope and believe that the topic on which I am going to speak tonight would have interested him.

This paper provides a brief introduction to caLIM, the Current Awareness for Legal Information Managers (http://193.62.18.223/dbtw-wpd/textbase/cadquery.htm) web database developed at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London and made freely available on the IALS Web site.

This article by Ann-Christin Karlén Gramming, Elisabeth Ejemyr and Elin Thunell is based on a presentation delivered at the BIALL Annual Conference in 2019. It focuses on promoting library services through an e-learning system called ‘Nano-learning’. It is an innovative way of promoting the library and its services in a new and engaging manner. It combats information overdose (usually followed by a rapid forgetting curve) by relying on spaced repetition. The system also comes with useful analytics and reporting tools, making it easy to measure and showcase ROI (return on investment) to partners.

Lesley Dingle describes the ESA, a digital archive based on interviews with prominent personalities associated with the Law Faculty of Cambridge University. It constitutes a unique repository of audio, textual and photographic materials, providing insights into the careers of scholars, jurists and practitioners. Motivations for the establishment of the archive in 2006 were: recording reminiscences of scholars back to WWII and its immediate aftermath; documenting developments in administration and teaching in the Faculty and colleges; archiving voices of scholars taking about their early lives, careers and published works; compiling a cross-indexed reference of personalities mentioned in interviews; and generating an awareness amongst students and younger staff of the rich heritage of the Faculty. The methodology and strategy of conducting interviews and compiling entries is briefly described. Finally, in the broader context of legal biography, it is argued that such oral histories are an essential component because they capture aspects of personality that written accounts cannot and thereby reveal traits that conventional biographies may miss. This claim is illustrated by selected examples from the archive, that currently contains twenty interviewees.

Malcolm Kendall offers guidance on how to establish whether a work is in fact an orphan work and examines efforts being made here and overseas in devising systems to make the search easier.

Alison Pope, Keith Puttick and Geoff Walton have been involved in the information literacy aspects of a project to help students improve their research skills and they report on this and the wider current debates on information literacy with an emphasis throughout on legal research skills.

Angela Carritt of the Bodleian Law Library gave a paper at the 38th Annual BIALL Study Conference in Sheffield in June 2007. She discusses Oxford University's Legal Research Skills Programme (LRSP), looking at its content, methodology and effectiveness. She also looks at the programme as an example of a stand-alone skills course and asks whether such courses can be effective. Additionally, she discusses students' use of online resources and suggests that they have developed computer based study strategies which make the use of print resources inconvenient. The paper draws on research by Sandra Meredith into students' expectations and experiences of the LRSP and how they use their learning after the classes.

After more than 60 years of development, the People's Republic of China has established the world's largest size of legal education, with 624 law schools and 450,000 thousands of undergraduate students currently enrolled. As Wenhua Shan explains, whilst the quality of education has also been improved, it generally falls short of meeting the domestic and international challenges that China is facing in legal education and practice. The most important measure recently adopted by the Chinese Government to enhance the quality of legal education, the “Outstanding Legal Personnel Education Scheme”, is poised to bring significant changes to the structure, contents and methods of Chinese legal education; and it will boost deeper cooperation between law schools and the practice sectors. Further measures are nevertheless required to achieve the desired results of the scheme and to place Chinese legal education in an internationally competitive position.

Loyita Worley outlines recent developments among law firms where outsourcing has been embraced in relation to their library, information and knowledge functions and services. She defines the terms and themes of the subject – outsourcing, offshoring, nearshoring and onshoring – and offers some thoughts for the future of legal information services in the commercial sector.

The legal information landscape has always been one of instability and change. The rate of these changes seems to be speeding up as societal and technological changes interact and impact our lives. In the face of this volatility, we should remain constant by being the human factor between information and our clients. We are the interface between new technology and the changing information usage behaviours of our clients. We must understand both aspects to ensure the best outcomes. Our client centric attitude positions us perfectly to be leaders when exploring, and perhaps even creating, new solutions. We are best placed to bring them back to our institutions and provide the human touch to ensure they are implemented in a way that will succeed and add value. It is important to embrace this constant state of flux and find our value in being supportive change agents, while also ensuring that we can ensure, and advocate for, the importance of safeguarding legal information for generations to come.

In this article Susan Doe reports from the perspective of the law firm sector on the progress towards the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation that became automatically ‘live’ on 25 May 2018. She provides an introduction to the Regulation, highlights some practicalities for law firms when considering compliance with GDPR and offers a ‘to do’ list with reference to the record of data processing, training needs, security, and contracts and documentation. She also provides advice on what should be considered especially in respect of client demands.

This article covers, and expands on, a presentation of the same name given at the BIALL Conference held in Brighton in 2010. The Health and Safety Executive Management Standards approach for tackling the cause of work-related stress was launched in November 2004. Since the launch, the HSE has worked with many thousands of organisations within the United Kingdom to implement the Management Standards approach. This work has provided the HSE with the opportunity to learn how best to manage the causes of work-related stress in the workplace.

This article from Gillian Sands looks at the cat and class skills taught on information studies courses and the use these skills are to new legal information professionals. The article is based on the opinions of nine new legal information professionals from both academic and law firm libraries.

The purpose of this article by Peter Clinch and Ruth Bird is to outline the latest findings from the recent review of foreign law holdings in the United Kingdom, and, in Part 4, to raise key questions relating to the future of these potentially endangered resources. The authors invite the legal research community to consider the many issues of concern raised by the results of this latest FLAG survey.