Jas Breslin gives a brief overview of the type of work corporate lawyers are involved with and the key resources that they need.

In the article Jackie Fishleigh, a regular contributor to LIM, looks at the vital and seemingly never-ending task of how to provide relevant and effective training in legal research to lawyers. The author shares her experiences in putting the new BIALL Legal Research 5 Stage Model through its paces with real audiences of live humans!

This article describes research which suggests that much more could be done to prepare Library and Information Science (LIS) graduates for a career in legal information, both in terms of greater career information availability and in greater preparation before working with legal information, such as knowledge of legal materials and ways of working. Greater promotion of this interesting and challenging information sector would ensure that LIS graduates are fully aware of law library work as a viable career path and are clear about what the work entails. Implications for CILIP, BIALL, Library Schools and university careers services are discussed.

There is a perception in the legal information profession that levels of information literacy among law students and trainee solicitors are lower than they should be. In this article Ian Hunter considers if this starts at sixth form level and discusses the Google generation stereotype. Training sessions given to sixth-form students by the author are described and the students' levels of information literacy are considered against various information literacy standards. The suitability of these standards for sixth form students is assessed and suggestions for future information literacy training at school, HE and trainee solicitor level are discussed.

Developing legal research skills is something that takes time and practice and can be enhanced with proper training. Marcie M. Baranich explores the various resources that HeinOnline offers to help law librarians and legal researchers develop their research skills in HeinOnline, from training guides and video tutorials to live webinars and support, together with the platforms and social media applications used to disseminate training resources, including the Wiki, Blog, YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter feed.

This article reviews the kinds of resources available to support the training of legal researchers and to guide them in their research, so that law librarians can avoid “re-inventing the wheel”. Karen Crouch places her emphasis on practical legal research. She also highlights some work in progress and possible future directions for legal learning resources and reviews some of the online tools that enable legal researchers to work more efficiently. The emphasis is on low cost resources, and those which enable additional value to be extracted from existing legal database subscriptions.

This article is written by Paul Magrath who is the Head of Product Development and Online Content at the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales (ICLR). His article explores the issues surrounding the custodianship of those public legal documents, such as court judgments, which form primary sources of law but which may also contain private data, and looks at the way custodians of such data can also act as gatekeepers, enhancing or inhibiting access by the public as well as more specialised users. It expands upon an article published by Infolaw.co.uk entitled “Custodians and gatekeepers: maintaining access to public legal information”, and refers to recent case law involving the tension between information in the public domain and the individual's privacy and “right to be forgotten” by search engines. The article also looks at how court documents are made accessible in other jurisdictions and imagines how things might be improved in our own courts, before concluding that the model of a not-for-profit organisation, such as the ICLR or BAILII (the British and Irish Legal Information Institute), may work as well if not better than public or private management of judgments and other legal public information.

Tony Simmonds explains the six types of Open Access licences which are available to academic users to preserve rights in their publications.

This article was written by Hannah Chandler, the Official Papers Librarian for the Bodleian Libraries. Her article looks at how the print collections were managed in the past and how the collections are managed and arranged today in Oxford. It looks at the complex and dynamic environment of official publishing in terms both of print and e-format. Looking to the future, it considers how shared working practices and policy on giving access to and archiving born digital material are benefitting the legal deposit libraries. Finally, the article outlines the breadth of the challenge, not only giving access to information in perpetuity but also making it accessible to the information professional and user.

This article by Paul Magrath examines the tensions between data protection and transparency in the context of a long overdue digital revolution in the courts of England and Wales. Many traditional hearings are being replaced by virtual or video-conference type hearings, and may in time be dealt with by an online court. There are concerns that open justice may suffer. Yet any attempt to remedy this with more transparent scrutiny of court information will need to conform to the stricter data protection regime under GDPR as well as respecting the privacy of litigants and the presumption of innocence. The author is Head of Product Development and Online Content with ICLR and a trustee of the Transparency Project.

No, I am not about to start an agony aunt copyright column but rather aim to select and try to resolve one or two copyright problems law librarians may have. Law librarians are no different from any other set of library and information professionals in finding copyright a difficult area. Copyright may be a minefield, as is so often said, but if one is aware of the potential problems and treads carefully, a safe path may be found through it.

A vendor launches what they promise to be a fantastic new product which you can not do without so you set up a trial. At the end of the trial you have lots of well-balanced feedback from across your organisation that you can use to determine whether or not to take the product and which also gives you some points for negotiation. Well, that is the theory anyway! In this article Chrissy Street aims to give some guidance about how to get closer to this in practice.

Taxonomies are becoming trendy! What do you, as a legal information professional, need to know about them? Do you already know a good deal because they appeared under the guise of classification schemes when you were studying librarianship or information science? In this article an attempt will be made to explain in comprehensible terms the place of taxonomies in current thinking about information retrieval, and in particular their relevance to your work as a legal information manager.

This paper, written by Gineke Wiggers, Suzan Verberne, Gerrit-Jan Zwenne and Wouter Van Loon, addresses the concept of ‘relevance’ in relation to legal information retrieval (IR). They investigate whether the conceptual framework of relevance in legal IR, as described by Van Opijnen and Santos in their paper published in 2017, can be confirmed in practice.1 The research is conducted with a user questionnaire in which users of a legal IR system had to choose which of two results they would like to see ranked higher for a query and were asked to provide a reason for their choice. To avoid questions with an obvious answer and extract as much information as possible about the reasoning process, the search results were chosen to differ on relevance factors from the literature, where one result scores high on one factor, and the other on another factor. The questionnaire had eleven pairs of search results. A total of 43 legal professionals participated consisting of 14 legal information specialists, 6 legal scholars and 23 legal practitioners. The results confirmed the existence of domain relevance as described in the theoretical framework by Van Opijnen and Santos as published in 2017.2 Based on the factors mentioned by the respondents, the authors of this paper concluded that document type, recency, level of depth, legal hierarchy, authority, usability and whether a document is annotated are factors of domain relevance that are largely independent of the task context. The authors also investigated whether different sub-groups of users of legal IR systems (legal information specialists who are searching for others, legal scholars and also for legal practitioners) differ in terms of the factors they consider in judging the relevance of legal documents outside of a task context. Using a PERMANOVA there was found to be no significant difference in the factors reported by these groups. At this moment there is no reason to treat these sub-groups differently in legal IR systems.

This article is written by Hélène Russell, author and teacher in the field of legal sector Knowledge Management. It presents an easy to read foundation level guide to legal sector Knowledge Management for law firm Information Professionals. It explains what Knowledge is, what Knowledge Management (KM) is, how it differs from Information Management (IM) and how law firm Information Professionals can expand their roles to help their organisations meet business goals through strategic KM as well as IM, or manage an imposed transition from IM to IM+KM.

This article by Rosemary Auchmuty and Erika Rackley introduces the Women's Legal Landmarks Project. The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration involving feminist scholars from law and other disciplines engaging in the process of identifying, researching and producing critical accounts of the key legal events, cases and statutes which represent significant turning points for women in the UK and Ireland. In creating the first scholarly anthology of legal landmarks for women spanning four jurisdictions and spanning eleven centuries, it seeks to contribute both to the development of the discipline of feminist legal history as well as societal understandings of the contribution women have made to public life and, more specifically, their involvement in the production of law, law reform and justice.

Scientific scholarly communication is subject to selection rules. In recent years, the issues around the assessment of research results has assumed a central role in academia. Despite recent efforts, by several initiatives both at national and international level, and the adoption of guidelines that emerged from the evaluation of research programs at European level, the measurement and evaluation of the quality of research still faces strong opposition from all bibliometric areas, in which the instruments available (amount of citations identified, the impact factor, and so on) are not appropriate to the humanities and social sciences. In particular, specific attention is paid today to the role of the book, which is a fundamental resource in the processes of scientific scholarly communication. In this regard this paper, written by Ginevra Peruginelli, analyses the missing link between the indicators and legal scholars' notions of quality, with reference to the role of the monograph in legal science.

This article by Rachel Brett of Lovells reports on the results of a survey into classification practice in law libraries carried out through the BIALL and LIS-Law mailing lists in March 2007. Major findings were that only three respondents did not use any form of subject classification. The most frequently used classification scheme was Moys, and the single largest grouping was the 40 respondents (40.8%) who used their own in-house classification schemes.

This article by Renae Satterley discusses a trial conducted over a four month period at Middle Temple Library where members were allowed to borrow iPads for a week, free of charge. The iPads were lent to the library by LexisNexis and had ebooks and a subscription to LexisLibrary loaded on to them. In this article the author discusses the pros and cons of lending tablets to library users and whether law ebooks are as popular as some claim. It also examines the possibilities of integrating tablet computers into legal research training sessions.

Undeniably the perception of success of an information unit or library in a law firm (or any other organisation for that matter) is down to two main factors. The level of support from the organisation is one, and often that could be interpreted as attitude and/or the level of the person who is responsible for allocating budget etc (ie the library partner) and/or how influential he or she is. The second: the way in which the Library or Information Unit Manager operates, their influencing and interpersonal skills, their general management of the information function, in particular creating the perception of being good value for money and invariably providing the right (quality) information in the right quantity at the right time.