Professor Graham Virgo, in delivering the 3rd Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture, asks if it is possible to become a legal practitioner in England and Wales without having studied Law as an academic discipline. Is there any point in studying for a Law degree? Students study any academic subject to acquire knowledge and to develop key skills. This is just as true of students studying Law. But is the knowledge acquired by a Law student and the skills which they develop really of benefit to them in legal practice? Crucially, what can the managers of legal information do to support the particular needs of Law students and academic researchers?

This article, by Emily Allbon, is based on a presentation given at the BIALL Conference in 2011. She explores the depth of student engagement with online resources and how to handle the information-complacent law student. She discusses the development Learnmore, Lawbore's legal skills wiki, and concludes with thoughts over future development of this resource.

This article is based on the parallel session given by Jackie Fishleigh at the BIALL Conference in 2011 which looked at how Legal Information Professionals can get involved and contribute their skills to collaborative projects using SharePoint.

Marianne Barber offers some practical observations from a trial introduction of eTextbooks at the College of Law. Ebook versions of the textbooks produced by the College (and published commercially by College of Law Publishing) were made available for the first time in 2010 to its Legal Practice Course students. This paper was originally presented at the BIALL Conference in June 2011 and included an overview of the variety of licensing models/platforms available, an analysis of the then level of response from teaching staff and students and likely touch-points for mass adoption in the legal field.

When faced with a U.S. legal research question, what options does the non-U.S. based researcher have, short of purchasing a subscription to one of the fee-based databases or visiting a major research library? This article will briefly discuss a number of no-cost and low-cost resources in the context of the process required to perform U.S. legal research and will also provide explanations of the different types of primary sources that a legal researcher might encounter.

Nick Davies delivered two lively sessions at the BIALL Conference 2011 concerning, “How to make your training engaging? Presenting so People Learn”. This article summaries those practical notions relating to effective delivery of training sessions and provides tips relating to the art of successful presenting.

Lesley Dingle, founder of the Eminent Scholars Archive, provides a further contribution based on interviews with Emeritus Professor John Anthony “Tony” Jolowicz, one of the great legal scholars at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College since 1952.

Peter Clinch, retired Senior Subject Librarian for Law, Cardiff University and Steven Whittle, Information Systems Manager at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies describe the developments relating to the FLARE Index to Treaties.

This paper, by Ginevra Peruginelli, examines the general issue of mapping concepts of different legal orders, with a focus on legal terminology and semantics of the law. Interoperability between legal thesauri is a possible operative solution in so far as it meets two important functions: cross-collection retrieval and cross-language retrieval. At a practical level a feasibility study, carried out by the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the National Research Council of Italy is described. The study aims at aligning a number of thesauri used in e-government services within the EU, while testing new methods of automatic mapping.

This is the latest report analysing the results of the survey conducted on behalf of the Society of Legal Scholars and BIALL. It has been written by Peter Clinch, formerly Senior Subject Librarian for Law, Cardiff University

In January 2011, Harvey Ingram and Borneos merged their businesses creating a full service law firm with over 400 staff and approximately 200 fee-earners. The new organisation is based in five sites over the Midlands and the Home Counties. In this article the Information Officer, Helen Marshall, and the Head of Knowledge Management, Jon Beaumont, examine the practical elements of such a merger from the point of view of the Knowledge and Information Team.

Victoria Jannetta describes her experiences at the AALL annual meeting in Philadelphia focusing on various particular sessions given in relation to free speech, Delaware corporation law, company mergers, academic library issues and ebooks.

Martha Facey summarises the answers given by three panellists during the seminar “Thinking beyond the Law: Effects of Interdisciplinary Research on Law Libraries” delivered at the conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries/Association Canadienne des Bibliotheques de Droit (CALL/ACBD) which took place in May 2011 in Calgary, Alberta.