This article by Jules Winterton, CEO of BAILII, is an expanded version of the presentation he delivered as the Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture 2022. The article briefly recounts the history of the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) and its achievements, the features of the service and the challenges of publishing judgments. It sets BAILII in the context of recent government initiatives and outlines plans for the future of BAILII.

In Autumn 2021 the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL) carried out a follow-up survey to the May 2020 ‘Covid-19 Industry Survey'. BIALL President, Catherine Bowl, gives an overview of the findings of ‘State of the Nation' survey which was published in December 2021. The results of the survey are to be found on the pages that follow this introduction.

Based on a presentation given at the BIALL Annual Conference in July 2022, this article by Paul Magrath provides an overview of how technology including artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming legal practice and the conduct of litigation, followed by more detailed consideration by way of a case study of ICLR's development of its AI-driven search tool, Case Genie. The article examines the problems that it was designed to solve, particularly the legal researcher's anxiety over ‘unknown unknowns’, and the options for further development of the technology and its application in other areas.

This article is a summary of a parallel session delivered by Stephen Gregory at the BIALL Conference 2022. We may frequently work with amended legislation but have we ever stopped to think about the processes involved in identifying and implementing amendments? Drawing on experiences of working with government lawyers this article explores how government legal information professionals can assist in identifying candidates for consequential amendment. The complexities of searching for references to specific legislation provisions are described, providing some suggested search solutions. A risk-based approach is suggested. He concludes that by working collaboratively government information professionals may add significant value and benefit.

Twenty years ago the author, Alison Million, submitted an article to Legal Information Management (LIM) entitled ‘Of Barristers and Books’ which recounted her experiences of working as a librarian to barristers’ chambers in the era of print and CDs. The article brought her into contact with the Librarian of Inner Temple Library and together they founded the Bar Librarians’ Group to meet the interests of both Inn and Chambers Librarians. This article in 2022 recounts how the ensuing 20 years have brought very different challenges to Chambers Librarians in the online era and how the Bar Librarians’ Group works hard to resolve difficulties on behalf of LIS professionals serving the Bar.

The purpose of this research is to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the legal information profession within law firm libraries in Britain and Ireland. As the pandemic only began the year before commencing this research, few studies had been conducted on the topic, thereby a clear opening for this study emerged. This study uses a survey research strategy comprised of a mixed methods research approach. Desk research in the form of a literature review opens the study. A questionnaire and 5 semi-structured interviews were subsequently conducted. To understand the impact of the pandemic on the legal information profession within law firm libraries, the research objectives break the topic down into 4 areas that give insight into the consequences of the pandemic. The research found that A) working from home was the major impact faced due to the lockdown in spring 2020; B) use and spending on print resources declined; C) the role of legal information professionals has not significantly changed; and D) future legal information professionals will need to upskill due to technological developments and improve the image of the profession. Owing to the recent outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to compare the findings of this research to similar future studies to determine the validity of the results.

This article, written by Jake Hearn, seeks to define and reevaluate artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of the corporate legal world. The article explores some of the opportunities on offer to information professionals to ensure that the profession continues to grow within the economic, cultural and professional context it is situated.

Easy-to-use software and apps have made video creation achievable and affordable for many library and information professionals. While there are parallels between delivering library training in-person and via a pre-recorded video, video creation does present additional challenges as well as exciting opportunities. This paper, by Charlie Brampton, uses Clark and Mayer's model of cognitive processing as a framework, and explores how video watching can lead to extraneous, essential and generative processing. These three concepts are explored individually, and practical advice is given about controlling each type of processing. The related topic of video accessibility is discussed, from both a legal and a practical perspective.

This article, written by Michelle Celik, outlines some of the working practices for an information professional in a barristers' chambers, highlighting how the culture differs to that of law firms. Michelle describes how the role has evolved since she began working in a set of chambers and the impact that Covid-19 has played on information provision in recent years. She discusses the importance of external libraries to the needs of barristers and her own relationship with the staff within chambers.

This paper is written by Gineke Wiggers, Suzan Verberne and Gerrit-Jan Zwenne and examines citations in legal documents in the context of bibliometric-enhanced legal information retrieval. It is suggested that users of legal information retrieval systems wish to see both scholarly and non-scholarly information, and legal information retrieval systems are developed to be used by both scholarly and non-scholarly users. Since the use of citations in building arguments plays an important role in the legal domain, bibliometric information (such as citations) is an instrument to enhance legal information retrieval systems. This paper examines, through literature and data analysis, whether a bibliometric-enhanced ranking for legal information retrieval should consider both scholarly and nonscholarly publications, and whether this ranking could serve both user groups, or whether a distinction needs to be made. Their literature analysis suggests that for legal documents, there is no strict separation between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. There is no clear mark by which the two groups can be separated, and in as far as a distinction can be made, literature shows that both scholars and practitioners (non-scholars) use both types. They perform a data analysis to analyze this finding for legal information retrieval in practice, using citation and usage data from a legal search engine in the Netherlands. They first create a method to classify legal documents as either scholarly or non-scholarly based on criteria found in the literature. We then semi- automatically analyze a set of seed documents and register by what (type of) documents they are cited. This resulted in a set of 52 cited (seed) documents and 3086 citing documents. Based on the affiliation of users of the search engine, we analyzed the relation between user group and document type. The authors’ data analysis confirms the literature analysis and shows much crosscitations between scholarly and non-scholarly documents. In addition, we find that scholarly users often open non-scholarly documents and vice versa. Our results suggest that for use in legal information retrieval systems citations in legal documents measure part of a broad scope of impact, or relevance, on the entire legal field. This means that for bibliometric-enhanced ranking in legal information retrieval, both scholarly and non-scholarly documents should be considered. The disregard by both scholarly and non-scholarly users of the distinction between scholarly and non-scholarly publications also suggests that the affiliation of the user is not likely a suitable factor to differentiate rankings on. The data in combination with literature suggests that a differentiation on user intent might be more suitable.

Professor Bill Cornish was a legal scholar of vision, who was well ahead of his time in two widely disparate areas, and in both he became a recognised leader and authority: legal history and intellectual property law. In the former he applied what was then the novel approach of stressing the contemporary social conditions to which the extant law had to apply - something that modern commentators could well ponder, but which he was honest enough to acknowledge was also criticised by some of his peers at the time. As for intellectual property law, his place as the ‘father of intellectual property teaching and scholarship in the UK’ was acclaimed by his admission as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1984, and his place as the inaugural occupant of the Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law, at Cambridge (1995–2004). Both these activities had their origins in Bill's long stay (1970–1990) as professor of law at the London School of Economics, where he was influenced by their emphasis on societal tertiary education, and his friendship with the renowned Anglo-German scholar Otto Kahn-Freund, respectively. In reality, though, Bill's upbringing in the unique milieu of immediate post-War South Australia, which he describes as a backwater of tranquility, and his urge to see Europe were the roots of his expansive vision of the law. Lesley Dingle interviewed Bill for the Eminent Scholars Archive (ESA) in 2015, nine years after his retirement, and these observations of this remarkable scholar are based on those conversations, and her readings of his works.

This article has been written by Harpreet K. Dhillon, with contributions from colleagues at Gray's Inn Library, Inner Temple Library, Middle Temple Library and Lincoln's Inn's Library. During the course of the article, Harpreet looks at the way the four of Inns of Court libraries support barristers, though will use the term members interchangeably throughout. The Inns have their own histories, and the libraries function in their own unique ways, so the focus of this article are those key services provided by all the libraries and their relevance to the continuing work of Inn members. The article has been written using anecdotal evidence and contributions from all the library teams, concluding that the Inn libraries play a crucial and ongoing role in supporting the work of barristers, a role that evolves and will continue to do so alongside the legal profession's demands.

This article is aimed at anyone who is responsible for recruiting staff and discusses how to prepare for a successful job interview. It is written in the context of a competitive recruitment market caused by the increased workload in law firms since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The author, Victoria North, is a senior information professional with many years of experience of building successful teams. She shares some of the best practices she has learnt during her career.

In this article Matthew Leopold, Head of Brand and Communications at LexisNexis, discusses the rise of the legal consultant and concludes that while the platform model is positioned well as a disrupter, the traditional law firm model is not going away anytime soon, with talent retention likely to become the biggest challenge for all legal firms over the next few years.

In recent years, the company called CB Resourcing has established itself in the recruitment business and regularly advertises for positions in the knowledge management, business research, legal tech and law librarianship worlds. In this short article one of the Directors of CB Resourcing, Simon Burton, offers some thoughts about the recruitment business, the current state of the market and describes the services that are provided by the company. The article has been written in the form of an interview with questions posed by the editor of this journal and answers given by Simon Burton.