This article aims to give a broad outline of what the JISC Legal Information Service is and why it was set up. In particular it deals with the challenges of the Internet and the new legislation that attempts to regulate it or stimulate its use. The Internet is fast becoming embedded in the FE/HE sector, in teaching and learning, research and administration–ignore it at your peril some might say. Yet there are risks to this, in some cases, enthusiastic rush to embrace all things that utilise the WWW. The relative ease of access, extraction and dissemination on ‘the net’ has tempted some to overlook the legalities. This article summarises briefly the main areas of law under consideration and the potential costs of infringement. It explains that FE/HE is subject to this legislation sometimes in specific ways. It concludes by stressing the need for feedback from the sector including BIALL members in order that the service can improve.

The library of the Royal Faculty of Procurators in Glasgow has been in existence for over 190 years. It is open to all practising and retired solicitors, advocates and law firms. This article by John McKenzie briefly outlines its history, relevance to the legal profession today, current set-up, challenges and future.

This paper follows up from a previous study on this topic and outlines the second part of a wider, two-part study on the information seeking behaviour (ISB) of law students. Exploratory work was outlined in a previous publication17 and there we found that although mobile technologies offered benefits to law students seeking information for their academic studies, there was concern from law librarians that the use of electronic resources via both non-mobile and mobile interfaces resulted in a loss of skills required for information retrieval due to the increasing capabilities of electronic resources’ search interfaces. To gain more insight into how law students were using mobile information resources, and better understand the advantages and disadvantages of such, we extended our study to a wider cohort and employed more research techniques including a focus group. This final phase of our study was conducted between 2015 to 2017. Here our cohort included another set of law librarians (13) and a further 54 law students. We expanded our research tools to include 2 thematic questionnaires and a focus group exercise. Our findings discovered that law librarians were concerned with the intangibility of digital formats. Law students remained indifferent to this aspect and valued the speed, multi-tasking and near-ubiquitous accessibility attributes that electronic format use via mobile technologies provided. These learnings and more, with conclusions, are reported in the course of this paper written by Zaki Abbas, Andrew MacFarlane and Lyn Robinson.

This article is a summary of the paper presented at the 34th Annual Study Conference of BIALL held in Cardiff, June 2003 by Nicki McLaurin Smith and Prue Presser. The paper consisted of a demonstration of LIST (Legal Information Skills Tutorial), which has been developed at the University of Melbourne Law School for the purpose of teaching legal research skills. The paper covered background information, evaluation, successes and shortcomings as well as extending an invitation for involvement in future collaborative projects of this nature with the Legal Resource Centre.

Jules Winterton recounts his experiences attending a recent conference in the Philippines and also provides a history of the professional information organisations in the Philippines and their relationships with IALL.

In this article John Franssen, Head of Research at Travers Smith LLP, gives an overview of what private equity is (including a brief glossary of some key terms), how private equity invests, the type of work lawyers in private practice are involved in and some of the key resources that they need and that are available. This article will also highlight the growing importance of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and sustainability investment for private equity managers.

This article by Thomas Shaw discusses the key findings of an MSc dissertation which examined legal information professionals' perceptions of what facilitates, and what impedes, the use of free and paid-for legal information resources. It also compares and contrasts the views of information professionals working in academia with those working in law firms. It is situated in the context of significant criticism of commercial legal publishing and the existence of many resources providing free legal information.

European Sources Online (ESO) is an electronic information service that provides information focusing on Europe. This article, by Ian Thomson of Cardiff University and Executive Editor of ESO, describes the development and the background to ESO, the key features and objectives of the service and current challenges.

Phil Wilkin runs the Archive of European Integration (AEI), University Library System, University of Pittsburgh, an online repository and archive for research materials on the topic of European integration. The AEI uploads both privately-produced papers and official European Union (EU) documents, which are freely available to all. Because the EU is a treaty- and law-driven organisation, a small percentage of the privately-produced papers and many of the official EU documents on the AEI are relevant to EU law, primarily in the areas of the implementation of EU law in policy and administrative areas and the work of the court system.

Bronwen Still explains the provisions of the new SRA Handbook in implementing an entirely new system of outcomes focused regulation. This approach sets out to give firms much more freedom to tailor their services to individual clients, rather than the previous system of detailed regulation.

This article by Shaunna Mireau contains a brief update on the activities of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries Vendor Liaison Committee and shares the unique features of the relationships between Canadian law librarians and the vendor community.

Clare Brown of Collyer Bristow revisits her earlier research on how the legal landscape is changing as a result of changes in regulation; the opening up of the profession to alternative business models and the effect of the internet on legal service provision.

Following the enactment of the Civil Procedure Rules in 1999, potential litigants are expected to pursue alternative means to litigation for solving their disputes. In this article, Nigel Broadbent a Director at Lupton Fawcett LLP in Leeds clearly explains the various activities which fall within ADR, including mediation, family dispute resolution, arbitration, conciliation and adjudication.

Ben Beljaars and René Winter contribute a thoroughly well-researched article on the profile of current users of academic libraries in Holland. They discuss their information requirements and usage; the relationship between the library and the law faculty; the use of digital resources in legal education and developments in legal information literacy.

This checklist by Ruth Bonino and Gemma Rosenthal of Reed Smith is the latest in our practical checklist series. They explain the meaning of flexible working; who is entitled to request it; the mechanics of requesting and the procedure to follow if the request is denied.

This article, by Daniel Hayter of Bloomberg Law, is based on a series of seminars presented to legal information professionals during 2007–2008. It includes a guide to corporate finance and methods of raising money in the capital markets. The author also describes the topical area of mortgage-backed securities.

This paper, taken from a presentation given by Melanie Farquharson, 3Kites Consulting, to the 39th Annual BIALL Conference held in Dublin in June 2008, discusses recent developments in the provision of federated search systems and how they can ease the legal research process. It also considers the attitude of legal publishers to such systems.

Sources of family law encompass a wide range of disciplines from children law to civil law and domestic law to international regulations. Geraldine Morris, solicitor and Family Practice Area Champion at LexisNexis Butterworths considers the wide ranging sources needed to support family lawyers.