Madelaine Dennison describes the work of the Oireachtas Library & Research Service (L&RS) and how it works for members of the Houses of the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament. The L&RS delivers a range of services to parliamentarians including a Legislative Analysis Service. Following a period of investment in the L&RS there is now a requirement to reduce costs while continuing to meet members' needs. A challenge for the L&RS is to become the research hub within parliament and the preferred information and research resource for members.

Wendy Small considers the potentially far-reaching changes in the structure of law firms in the light of the recession and advises information professionals on how they should reconsider the nature of the services they offer to ensure that they remain business critical.

The Eminent Scholars Archive (ESA) was established to record aspects of the history of the Faculty of Law at Cambridge University. It is based on 28 interviews with scholars and, currently, has 66 hours of audio recordings and transcripts, but also includes over 800 photographs and numerous associated items including biographies, bibliographies, obituaries and eulogies. Entries for faculty members cover the period from WWII to the present, while 13 entries focus on the incumbent Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science. The archive is a rich source of information for researching aspects of legal communities, and in this contribution I focus on three aspects: personal histories of scholars, faculty history, and more socially-broad topics. In the first category I seek to show how the ESA identifies crossroads in the personal legal journeys of professors Higgins, Baker, Smith and Crawford, while I use their common remembrances to record an institutional landmark. For the latter, I selected the 1995 Faculty move from the Old Schools to the Foster building on the Sidgwick site. Finally, I show how ESA illustrates components of legal life writing in a broader societal context. Here I compare the experiences of curators of family histories at the British Library, and ‘group biographies’ of court officials as researched at LSE, with aspects of documenting careers of senior legal academics at Cambridge.

Legal research is an important aspect of the legal profession and is something that students will learn how to conduct during their education. David Hand and Matthew Terrell describe a research project, conducted by Justis, a vLex company, which has identified that the teaching of legal research is highly variable across universities, who broadly adopt one of three models. At individual universities, students are not always aware of the legal research platforms to which their university may subscribe. These are factors which can have an impact on student confidence in conducting legal research and may contribute to the level of additional support that students seek. To address these issues, this research suggests the possibility of a standardised approach to legal research teaching.

This paper is written by Gineke Wiggers, Suzan Verberne and Gerrit-Jan Zwenne and examines citations in legal documents in the context of bibliometric-enhanced legal information retrieval. It is suggested that users of legal information retrieval systems wish to see both scholarly and non-scholarly information, and legal information retrieval systems are developed to be used by both scholarly and non-scholarly users. Since the use of citations in building arguments plays an important role in the legal domain, bibliometric information (such as citations) is an instrument to enhance legal information retrieval systems. This paper examines, through literature and data analysis, whether a bibliometric-enhanced ranking for legal information retrieval should consider both scholarly and nonscholarly publications, and whether this ranking could serve both user groups, or whether a distinction needs to be made. Their literature analysis suggests that for legal documents, there is no strict separation between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. There is no clear mark by which the two groups can be separated, and in as far as a distinction can be made, literature shows that both scholars and practitioners (non-scholars) use both types. They perform a data analysis to analyze this finding for legal information retrieval in practice, using citation and usage data from a legal search engine in the Netherlands. They first create a method to classify legal documents as either scholarly or non-scholarly based on criteria found in the literature. We then semi- automatically analyze a set of seed documents and register by what (type of) documents they are cited. This resulted in a set of 52 cited (seed) documents and 3086 citing documents. Based on the affiliation of users of the search engine, we analyzed the relation between user group and document type. The authors’ data analysis confirms the literature analysis and shows much crosscitations between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. In addition, we find that scholarly users often open non-scholarly documents and vice versa. Our results suggest that for use in legal information retrieval systems citations in legal documents measure part of a broad scope of impact, or relevance, on the entire legal field. This means that for bibliometric-enhanced ranking in legal information retrieval, both scholarly and non-scholarly documents should be considered. The disregard by both scholarly and non-scholarly users of the distinction between scholarly and non-scholarly publications also suggests that the affiliation of the user is not likely a suitable factor to differentiate rankings on. The data in combination with literature suggests that a differentiation on user intent might be more suitable.

Kate Faulkner introduces a collection of material left to the Squire Law Library by veteran historian, Henry Button. Her article discusses the sorting through of this small collection of books, pamphlets and correspondence that was gathered during his research. It looks at how Button's interests developed to include the first female lawyers and the longest-serving legal professionals. It concludes with some information about Henry Button himself and provides a list of the books that were part of the collection.

This is the latest report analysing the results of the Society of Legal Scholars and BIALL Survey. It has been written by David Gee, Deputy Librarian at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

In this conference report Vola Walker gives an account of the conference of the Australian Law Librarians Association (ALLA) held in Sydney in 2013.

This article and the one following are derived from a joint talk given at the BIALL Annual Conference 2017, 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 Hilary Smith takes a view from the client perspective.

This well-attended full-day seminar on 22 April 2002 was held at the British Library Conference Centre, a comfortable venue with space for a small exhibition by the main legal information providers separate from the auditorium. It was organised jointly by BIALL and SCOOP (Standing Committee on Official Publications). Speakers included Sarah Carter (University of Kent), Alan Pawsey of HMSO, Tony Hopkins from the Statutory Publications Office and Joe Ury, Executive Director of BAILII. The afternoon focused on the commercial providers of legal information, providing a forum for speakers from Context, Westlaw UK, LEXIS and Lawtel.

On 18th April 2002, I found myself on a flight to Chicago. My ultimate destination was Madison, Wisconsin, and I would be spending the next month at the University of Wisconsin's Law Library. This article gives me the opportunity to share some of my experiences, as well as outlining the benefits of this type of professional development opportunity.

So Lawtel has become part of the ever-growing empire that is Sweet & Maxwell. Their duopoly with Butterworths extends and the poor librarian has one less independent place to go to for information. But the question is, how will this affect us in our daily lives? Will we see this very good service swallowed up and become part of Westlaw or will it remain functioning independently?

A campaign to bring the law up-to-date with the current world of publishing has been led by the British Library, on behalf of all the legal deposit libraries and the publisher trade bodies. If the move is successful, new generic legislation will ensure that non-print formats are included within legal deposit – allowing UK businesses and education to benefit from access to the widest possible collections of research material, now and in the future.

Alison Lorrimer, Librarian in Departmental Solicitor's Office outlines the work of Departmental Solicitor's Office and how the library service has evolved to meet the information requirements of the office.

The ever increasing capabilities of online legal research platforms have revolutionised the strategies we adopt in tackling routine research questions. It is now possible, for example, to comprehensively identify later judicial references to any given earlier case at the click of a button. However, we are potentially running the risk of believing that the online platforms are capable of providing us with answers to questions that they are not yet able to deliver. In this short article Daniel Hoadley focuses on the capability of the current spread of online research platforms to answer a frequent and fundamental legal research question: “is this case still good law?”

The statute book is a large, complex system; a vast corpus of texts dating back to the thirteenth century, now evolving at a rate of around 100,000 words a month1. The volume and pace of change combine with the constraints of current generation of digital tools to present a real barrier to researchers, limiting the type of research that is currently possible. The statute book is simply too big, and changes too rapidly, for any one person to easily comprehend. This situation is transformed if you view legislation as data, and then apply big data technologies and new data analysis techniques to that data. The aim of the Big Data for Law research project2 is to do just that; applying the latest analytical techniques to legislation, making it possible to research, interrogate and understand the statute book as a whole system. An important part of the initiative is to make available the raw data for conducting this type of research, alongside new tools and methods for working with the content. In this article, John Sheridan, Head of Legislation Services at The National Archives, sets out some of the ideas that underpin the project and describes the new service that researchers can use from Spring 2015.

In this article Margarethe Sannino shares some information on how legal research works in an international law firm with several offices. The focus is on German law and legal materials. A short introduction to German law is followed by an outline of German research resources in general and then, further on, there are two parts describing specific approaches to research from Margarethe's daily work; research on company/corporate law requests as well as research on legislative acts.

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.

Since May 1997, the constitutional structure of the United Kingdom has been transformed. A developed Parliment in Scotland and a devolved Assembly in Wales have been established. After a false start in December 1999 which lasted only 11 weeks before suspension in February 2000, the Northern Ireland Assembly was reconvened in May 2000. In England, Regional Development Agencies and Regional Chambers are up and running in each of the English regions and the Government is strengthening the Government Offices of the Regions. Campaigns for directly elected regional assemblies are becoming increasingly active in some of the english regions. In May 2000 Ken Livingstone was elected London's first directly elected Mayor. In elections of the Greater London Assembly the Labour amd Conservative parties won 9 candidates each, the Liberal Democrats 4 and the Green 3. Devolution has also brought about changes in the centre, with a reduction in the number of Scottish and the Welsh ministers and changes in Parlimentary procedures.