This paper is based on a presentation of the same title given by Jane Bradbury, Head of Knowledge and Information at the law firm Slaughter and May, at the inaugural seminar of the BIALL Knowledge Management Group on 9th May 2016. The article has been compiled by the other two authors, Jon Beaumont and Tim Barlow, and so not all of the opinions expressed are attributable to Jane. The authors are also indebted to Anne Ashdown, of recruitment firm tfpl, who presented at the same seminar on the subject of recruitment for legal knowledge management (KM) roles and whose observations are also incorporated in the article. The paper considers the increasing impact of KM on the work of library and information professionals in law firms. It discusses the related role of professional support lawyers (PSLs), the knowledge “hot topics” which are driving evolution of the profession, the transferability of information skills, and opportunities for development and career progression beyond the traditional boundaries of library and information management.

Work on the official history of criminal justice prompted Paul Rock's interest in why it was that so many government papers, amounting to some 98% of the files produced, have been destroyed over the years. Successive crises in the accumulation of records, accompanied by only a limited increase in the shelving capacity of the Public Record Office - later The National Archives - led in the 1950s and beyond to a firm emphasis being placed on the destruction rather than the retention of papers. Officials and politicians were adamant that the unforeseeable demands which future historians might make on the archives had to be accorded less importance than the economic practicalities of what was called ‘weeding’.

This article by Jennie Grimshaw presents an overview of the transition of UK government publishing from print to electronic between the mid-1990s and 2016. It goes on to describe the tools being developed by the British Library in collaboration with the other five legal deposit libraries, to collect, preserve, organise and provide access to born digital government publications. This paradigm shift in official publishing gives the libraries a window of opportunity to improve their management of these materials and ensure that they can be found through their catalogues more easily than their print predecessors.

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 paper is based on a parallel session at the BIALL Conference 2016 which was given by Helen Marshall and Kelly Taylor from Pinsent Masons. Pinsent Masons has a ground-breaking team of research analysts providing the firm with in-depth sector and market analysis. This innovative approach has benefits for Pinsent Masons and also for the research team. These include increased visibility within the firm and developing a role as a trusted adviser to the business. The team are drawn from a variety of backgrounds, including experienced law librarians. In this article, Kelly and Helen, who are both from a law librarian background, will explain Pinsents' unique approach to business and sector insight. The article covers how the team adds value to the firm and charts the development of our existing skillsets to meet this new challenge. The article also includes some practical insight into approaching business research and how to overcome common obstacles, notably the challenge in expanding our output from traditional legal research to more business and commercially aware pieces.

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 paper draws on the work of the Evidence and Insight Team, a dedicated research function presently at the Mayor's Office for Policing And Crime, previously based within the Metropolitan Police Service for over a decade. The aim of the paper is to make readers aware of the obliquely hidden data goldmine that exists within UK policing. Such data captures the decisions police make routinely, the kinds of situations police encounter and with whom. This rich data seam goes beyond crime – and should be used more outside of policing. The authors, Paul Dawson and Elizabeth A. Stanko, argue that interested academics need a better roadmap of the data in order to stimulate basic knowledge and usage. Three case studies are presented that illustrate the scope and challenges of working with such data.

In 2016 BIALL published a Professional Skills Framework which describes the skills and experience which legal information professionals need to perform their role. The aim of the framework is act as a benchmarking tool for personal professional development and to assist managers with appraisal and recruitment processes.

‘Embedded librarianship’ has been on the rise in the legal sector since the early 2000s, but what is it and why has it become so popular? This article, written by Peter Wilson and Cosmo Anderson, aims to open up the wider conversations around embedded librarianship through a combination of the authors' practical experience and original research of librarians in UK and Irish law firms.

The quarterly bulletins on crime statistics in England and Wales are compiled from two sets of data: crime survey and police-recorded crime. Whilst the former is considered to give the most reliable trends, the latter has a greater level detail for a fuller spectrum of crimes types. This paper by Allan Brimicombe, explores the advantages and problems of analysing police-recorded data for the insights they contain. This is illustrated by examples from an analysis of domestic violence.

This article is written by Clare Cowling, Director, Legal Records at Risk Project, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. Her article explores the hypothesis that modern private sector legal records are more at risk of loss than their historical equivalents. There are many reasons for this, but one factor, detailed in this article, appears to be the indifference or reluctance of legal practitioners themselves. The LRAR project seeks to allay any concerns practitioners may have about confidentiality and to raise their awareness of the potential commercial and historic value of their legal records. It will do this by a combination of case studies, interviews with stakeholders and investigations into the current information management and archiving practices of institutions specialised to law. In so doing it will provide guidance and advice on the more cost-effective management and preservation of legal records so that the history of change to non-governmental legal services in the UK over the past century will be accurately documented.

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.

The intersection of freedom of information, privacy legislation and library services may be interpreted as the relation between two bodies (law and library) and how they influence one another directly and indirectly. This means library services can be shaped enormously by both federal and provincial freedom of information and privacy laws. We notice that there are cases in various Canadian courts involving disagreements concerning the rule of law in the fields of freedom of information and privacy with libraries. The combined effects of legislation and stronger library policies may make it more challenging for users to understand how to use shared library resources and services properly. For many libraries, this means operational policies and professional ethics codes have to be revised to strictly respect the users and employees’ confidentiality rights. The research method used for this paper included a search of relevant Canadian court cases as case studies.