In this article Kate Faulkner describes her experience of creating an index for 36 volumes of committee minutes for the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, and explains the processes involved. She explores the unique issues associated with the indexing of minutes and relates some of the aspects of human interest found within the material and discusses the role of the indexer.

Legal information management is crucial for Chinese Lawyers who practice law in non-litigation and litigation legal areas. Li Zheng, Attorney at Law from PRC, provides a brief overview of the legal procedure, at a practical level, from the point of view of a Chinese lawyer.

“Wales, it has to be said, has come a very long way in a short time.” was the opening line by Sir David Lloyd Jones in his speech on, “The Law Commission and Law Reform in a Devolved Wales” to the Wales Governance Centre Annual Lecture in Aberystwyth in March 2013.1 This brief overview by Lillian Stevenson attempts to discuss this statement using selected documents published after the 2011 referendum in which the people of Wales voted in favour of extending the law making powers of the National Assembly.

With job hunters seemingly now outnumbering vacancies in the legal information field by some margin, recruiters currently have plenty of choice in front of them when seeking to fill a post with the right candidate. In the current market, the applicants themselves need to do everything they can to maximise their chances of selection. The general aspects of good and bad practice in job hunting and recruiting should be obvious to everybody of a professional status. But are they? We're all supposed to know the textbook dos and don'ts of recruitment and selection; but how much attention are employers and candidates in the information sector really paying to the detail? Through his role as Library Manager in the London branch of a national network of law schools, Mark Haines has sat on the recruitment and interview panels for over thirty posts over the past six years. He has also been job hunting himself during this time; applying for more than fifty posts over the past two years, and attending more than a dozen interviews. As a result of these experiences, he has witnessed countless examples of good and bad practice. Employers and applicants may all be aware of what they should be doing, but in this paper he will be discussing his experiences of what they're really doing; and most importantly, what can be done to improve performance in the light of this.

Joseph A. Semugabi, Chief Librarian at the Law Development Centre, discusses political-legal developments since 1986 which resulted in the restoration of rule of law and the liberalization of university education in Uganda. He then explains how these have had a significant impact on the country's only institution of practical legal training and its law library.

Legal education in each of the jurisdictions varies in the requirements of its lawyers. In this paper, Ruth Bird, addresses the requirements in each country to study law; the specific requirement for foreign law graduates to study law, and which bodies regulate legal education. The answers to these questions are presented in a series of charts to provide a degree of clarity for the reader.

In this article Jackie Fishleigh reviews and analyses three of the sessions, held at the BIALL Conference 2013 in Glasgow, that were concerned with ‘soft skills’.

This article aims to identify and define some of the legal issues, the computer misuses and the information misbehaviour associated with IT security that are increasingly a matter for civil litigation, criminal cases and national policy where fighting serious organised crime and cybercrime are concerned. The author, Brunella Longo, investigates this subject, suggests criteria and offers practical guidance for researching the issues. The article also includes references to relevant legislation, normative technical standards and best practices that have emerged as a result of corporate IT developments.

In a previous article for LIM, Raj Kumar Bhardwaj wrote about online legal information services and their uses at the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi.1 This new article looks at Institutional Repositories (IRs) which in the academic world, help to re-define the production, dissemination and the use of the intellectual output from an institution. A project to develop an IR offers numerous opportunities to become engaged with information and scholarly material beyond the nature of traditional library services. In this paper, Raj Kumar Bhardwaj and Shikha Kaushik jointly discuss some of the issues, experiences and theories around the institutional repository that has been developed at St Stephen's College.

Is Google a substitute for using known, authoritative websites for cases, legislation and other official information? Ian Hunter writes about the test searches that he carried out on Google and discusses the results he noted. In this exercise, consideration is given to whether the websites retrieved are authoritative and also attention is paid to Google's ranking of results.

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!

There is no doubt that the ‘Google Generation’ or ‘Digital Natives’ are entering legal education with a very different set of skills than those who came before them. In this article Daniel Bates examines the precise nature of the skillset of those beginning their legal careers, and considers his experiences teaching research skills to law students at the University of Cambridge for over a decade. Furthermore, he considers how students' educational and cultural background in the areas of research and information literacy should inform the teaching of legal skills.

In 2008, BIALL held a pre-conference workshop in Dublin entitled “Back to Basics: Cataloguing and Classification”. The workshop raised some interesting questions about the quality of cataloguing training provided by library schools and law libraries. Although cataloguing in British law libraries has been the subject of research, no study has yet explored cataloguing in Irish law libraries. This study by Clare O'Dwyer redresses this lack of information by focusing exclusively on the Irish context. The perceptions and expectations of cataloguers are examined using a multiple case study design combining interviews and questionnaires. The libraries selected for case study are representative of the three main types of law libraries in Ireland: a professional society law library, a government law library and a law firm library. Following analysis and discussion of the research findings, the study concludes with a series of recommendations regarding the curriculum for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and further training of cataloguers in Irish law libraries.

This article, analysing the results of the Academic Law Library Survey for 2011/2012 has been written by David Gee, Deputy Librarian at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. The survey was conducted on behalf of Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) and BIALL.

This article written by Jasmin Hollingum was adapted from her coursework that she submitted as part of an MSc in Library and Information Studies. It posits that whilst collection development policies (CDPs) are in widespread use in academic institutions, they are currently under-used in law firms. It considers what benefits a written CDP could deliver to a law firm library and identifies the problems that firm librarians face when developing such policies. Finally it seeks to establish ways in which they might be overcome.

The calm and courteous mannerisms that Professor Len Sealy's interviews radiate belie a pragmatic determination that has been the hallmark of his long and productive career. For nearly six decades he has been a legal pioneer, working assiduously to elevate the law of commerce, and in particular company law and insolvency, to scholarly respectability in academia and practical understanding in boardrooms. Yet typically, for one who spent his entire professional life collaborating with wealth creators of the commercial world, he eschewed direct personal involvement in such activities. His loyalty to the scholastic tradition, mirrored in his unstinting service to his college and the Faculty, has generated a legacy of fond regard and intellectual respect. These reflections by Professor Sealy are based on interviews with Lesley Dingle at the Squire Law Library during February and April 2013. They should be read in conjunction with Professor Sealy's entry in the Eminent Scholars Archive1.

In this article, Jackie Fishleigh looks at ways in which legal information managers can demonstrate their personal value and effectively market their services. In so doing she draws on her own recent experience promoting the intranet to every department in her law firm.

In this, the third of a trilogy of articles for LIM written by Raj Kumar Bhardwaj, the author addresses the move from print to digital legal information within the Indian judicial system. He describes briefly the historical development of the legal system and the enormous backlog of cases that are pending throughout the court structure, before turning attention to the role of ICT in the legal system and the moves under way to create a more efficient electronic administration for the judiciary in India.