Welcome to the summer issue of Legal Information Management (LIM) which celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL). Back in 1999, on Friday 16th April 1999 to be precise, a BIALL Council meeting took place that was held at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London. The minutes of that meeting record that,

Current debates about decolonisation and diversification raise practical issues for librarians. The Bodleian Law Library is engaging with these challenges, in co-operation with the Oxford Law Faculty, the wider Bodleian Library and the collegiate university. This article by Margaret Watson describes how the Library is taking a fresh look at its collections and their organisation, with a view to acquiring, revealing and collocating material that might otherwise by overlooked.

The Artificial intelligence revolution is happening and is going to drastically re-shape legal research in both the private sector and academia. AI research tools present several advantages over traditional research methods. They allow for the analysis and review of large datasets (‘Big Data’) and can identify patterns that are imperceptible to human researchers. However, the wonders of AI legal research are not without perils. Because of their complexity, AI systems can escape the control and understanding of their operators and programmers. Therefore, especially when run by researchers with insufficient IT background, computational AI research may skew analyses or result in flawed research. Premised thus, the main goals of this paper, written by Ronald Yu and Gabriele Spina Alì, are to analyse some of the factors that can jeopardize the reliability of AI-assisted legal research and to review some of the solutions to mitigate this situation.

In this article Dunstan Speight, President of BIALL 2018–2019, provides a short overview of current challenges and opportunities facing the profession. In addition to trends affecting all types of law libraries, the article discusses some of the main issues facing the three main types of information service: academic, law firm and chambers, and professional bodies. The article concludes with a discussion of how core skills and experience are still relevant in the fast-changing world of legal information.

James Richard Crawford was born in Adelaide in November 1948, where he went to school and eventually graduated from Adelaide University with an LLB and a BA in 1971. His political views were coloured by his country's involvement in the Vietnam War, and these were reflected in his vision of international law, which he researched under Ian Brownlie for his LLD at Oxford (1972–73). The result was his seminal text The Creation of States in International Law. After returning to Australia, James Crawford spent the next 18 years pursuing a career in academia and government legal service, culminating in his occupying the Challis chair at Sydney in 1986. Further recognition of his standing in international law came when Cambridge appointed him to the Whewell Chair in 1992, and the Directorship of the Lauterpacht Centre 1997–2003 and 2006–2009. After 23 years in Cambridge, Professor Crawford was elected to the bench of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2015, where, in May 2018, Lesley Dingle recorded nearly 4 hours of conversation with him in his chambers at the Peace Palace. The audio and transcript records of these interviews have been presented in the Eminent Scholars Archive, along with a narrative biography. During his parallel careers, academic and juristic, James Crawford wrote extensively on international law. His works reveal a distinctive vision of the law's legacy and future prospects. In the present article, Lesley Dingle expands on some of the perspectives that underpin this Crawfordian vision of international law, inter alia: historical contingency, human enhancement, the legal polymath, personal priorities, and constraints on ICJ judges.

Guy Holborn revisits the research he carried out in preparing the chapter on law libraries from 1850 to 2000 in the Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. Much of the material he gathered was not included in the chapter as published for reasons of space. Drawing from both the previously published chapter and the unpublished material, he selects four themes relevant to BIALL in its 50th anniversary year: legal education and law libraries, the development of law firms and their information services, the content of law libraries and the information needs of the profession, and the emergence of the professional law librarian.

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.

Simon Drane writes that the next decade will see a shift within legal service provision, where it will transition from a model which is predominantly geared around internal work processes to one that is geared around customer outcomes. Law firms will complete their evolution from a bill by the hour service-based model to something closer to a product subscription model. This shift will deliver growth, sustainable recurring revenues at high margins and new higher value service opportunities. At the core of this shift is the changing nature of consumption driven by consumer technology and the inexorable drive for base level information to become free. Law firms are sitting on vast quantities of data, and yet very few are currently harnessing this effectively in their offerings. The effective use of data combined with technology will allow innovative organisations to provide a new form of productised offering which will not only drive new recurring revenues but will allow them to offer higher value business advisory services. Whereas effective use of data within the organisation will lead to better evolutionary efficiency, quality and risk management, the use of data externally for clients will lead to more revolutionary changes. It will also blur the lines further between traditional law firms and LegalTech product businesses, in the way alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) and the Big Four are already exploring.

In this article, James Harper of LexisNexis UK outlines the company's bi-centenary, and its contribution to the ‘rule of law’. The article will describe the fascinating development of UK law during this period, focusing on key milestones in arguably the largest and most exponential increase in the quantity of English language law the world has seen. It will also outline the range of legal industry innovations which LexisNexis and its companies have spearheaded over the years.

The Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture 2019 was delivered at the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians’ Annual Conference by Brenda Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond, DBE,1 the President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. Lady Hale reflected upon some of the major changes in the law and access to justice since she was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge and Willi Steiner was Law Librarian at the Squire Law Library. Her lecture coincided with BIALL's fiftieth anniversary year and focused on five significant developments: the explosion of judicial review of administrative action, the arrival of EU law, the growth of international human rights law, the recognition of gender and other equality, and devolution and the evolution of a new constitutional role for the courts.

The role of the law librarian or legal information professional is thought by some to have been diminished significantly by technological advances which provide instant access to an enormous range of materials direct to individual users at their desks. The reality is that the wide range of instantly accessible materials makes the experience and knowledge of the information professional more important, not less; and imminently expected advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence are likely to confirm the vital importance of the legal information professional at the centre of legal services.

This article by Paul Magrath considers the role of law reporting not only as a service in support of the administration of justice and legal education, but also in the wider context of open justice, transparency and public legal information. It traces the history of law reporting and considers the pros and cons of the more comprehensive publication of judgments of the senior courts made possible by digitisation and the internet, in comparison with the more selective approach adopted in the past. The article is loosely based on a presentation given at the annual conference of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians held in Bournemouth in June 2019.

The aim of this qualitative study is to explore new barristers’ information literacy (IL) experiences during their transition from education to the workplace. New barristers are defined as individuals currently doing pupillage or who qualified as professionals in the last two years. Although the transition into work constitutes an important period in new barristers’ legal careers during which they face many IL challenges, so far neither new barristers’ perspectives on their IL experiences nor their transition experiences have been examined in detail. The study employed semi-structured interviews to explore the IL experiences of six new barristers.* This thesis finds that new barristers face a variety of IL challenges and thus have different transition experiences. For them, legal research has emotional implications. As professionals, they have IL needs and experiences that are dissimilar from the ones they developed during their education. This impacts on the content and delivery of IL training for new barristers. The study broadens our understanding of legal IL and new legal professionals’ IL needs. It has implications for law librarians and legal educators as it throws the complexity of new barristers’ workplace IL into relief. Finally, the study offers some recommendations for IL training.

In this short article, David Ibbetson, the Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Cambridge, writes about the value of the law librarian in the academic context. His wide-ranging interests cover English and European legal history and, in particular, the historical relationship between English Common Law and the legal systems and legal thought of the rest of Europe. His experiences of using law libraries and receiving assistance from academic-based law librarians has led him to acknowledge the true value of the profession.

This is the latest report analysing the results of the annual Academic Law Library Survey that is jointly sponsored by the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) and the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL). It has been compiled and written by David Gee, Librarian at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, a part of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.