Legal Research

iLegal iphone app

Posted on April 29, 2010
Anyone who has an iPhone (I wish!) might be interested in having a look at the following website http://www.ilegalapps.com/index.html described as the "law in your pocket" this app has been developed by a law student and is available for downloading from the iTunes app store...

New pages on the BIALL How Do I? wiki

Posted on April 28, 2010
Since the BIALL wiki's inception, the PR committee and Wiki Writers continue to work on its content by adding new pages and updating others. Some recent pages added include those on a list of organisations which accept old or superseded material, guides on citing legal authorities, surveys on library management systems (and other IT applications) used in law firms, conducting Hansard research, sources of Northern Ireland Legislation, Cyprus legislation, and obtaining transcripts from Magistrates' Courts...

Halsbury's Awards 2010 now open for nominations

Posted on April 23, 2010
The Halsbury?s Awards recognise outstanding service in law libraries and legal information services in Great Britain and Ireland.Organised by the British and Irish Association of Law Libraries (BIALL) and LexisNexis, these are the only awards to recognise the value of dedicated teamwork within legal information services...

Wallace Breem Memorial Award 2010 now open for nominations

Posted on April 16, 2010
You are invited to nominate candidates for the Wallace Breem Memorial Award 2010.The award is sponsored by The Inner Temple and BIALL and is designed to recognise especially good contributions to law librarianship, or provide financial assistance for special research or other projects at doctorate level or above...

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Your association needs you!

Posted on March 30, 2010
Lord Kitchener once said ? ?Your country needs you?. This might sound corny ? but your association also needs you. We need your views, suggestions, expertise and involvement to ensure the continued success of BIALL.In the last BIALL Newsletter, we included an invitation for nominations for the election of officers and members...

The BIALL How Do I? wiki opens up!

Posted on March 26, 2010
For those following the progress of the BIALL wiki, you'll be pleased to learn that the PR & Promotions Committee are opening up the wiki, allowing registered users to not just comment on pages, but also create and edit them too! All current "Readers" of the wiki will be given "Writer" level, which will allow users to edit pages and revert pages to previous versions...

BIALL 2010 Dissertation Award

Posted on March 25, 2010
BIALL is now inviting entries for the 2010 Dissertation Award.This year?s prize is £250 PLUS free membership to BIALL for one year. Membership entitles you to:A subscription to Legal Information Management journal worth £104Full access to the BIALL website, BIALL Newsletter & Email Forum25% off FT ResearchDiscounted rates for conferences, professional development courses, networking events and much more! The small print: Open to all undergraduate and postgraduate library school students on a CILIP accredited courseThe topic must be of a corporate or legal natureThe dissertation must be submitted electronically and include an executive summaryIt must be submitted to vivian...

LIG survey of BIALL members

Posted on March 22, 2010
BIALL's Legal Information Group is currently running a survey of the membership, asking them about their attitudes towards their suppliers. The first week of the survey has gone well, with well over a hundred responses being submitted, but the views of anyone who has not yet filled out the survey will be gratefully received...

Bursaries for Brighton 2010

Posted on March 15, 2010
Fancy going to the BIALL Conference in Brighton, but it?s not your turn?New to legal information management or BIALL?Old hand, but currently out of work?Would like to apply for a bursary, but not sure you?re eligible?Library student interested in law librarianship?***This year, Council has again provided a generous sum to support attendance of BIALL members at the Annual Conference...

Resilience in Today's Marketplace Seminar - Thursday 4th March @ BPP, Holborn

Posted on March 08, 2010
This evening seminar kicked off at 18.30 last Thursday with Sue Hill and Lesley Robinson asking everyone why they were there. A lot of people were clearly hedging their bets, as challenges were heading their way: out-sourcing, restructuring, mergers, and re-deployment all mentioned as current issues...

BIALL Cheese & Wine evening

Posted on March 01, 2010
The annual BIALL Cheese and Wine Evening took place at Lincoln's Inn on Friday 26th February. You can view photos from the night on the BIALL Flickr page. Many thanks to the Professional Development Committee for organising such a fun evening!

Let us never fear to negotiate...

Posted on February 08, 2010
Looking for some hints and tips when negotiating with suppliers? You need look no further then David Percik's excellent presentation from Online Information 2009, "Let us never fear to negotiate"David, who is currently chair of the BIALL Legal Information Group (LIG) looks at all aspects of interaction with suppliers...

BIALL Awards and Bursaries

Posted on February 05, 2010
Every year BIALL offers a number of Bursaries and Awards, which members can apply for and nominate individuals for. Please do support our partners and colleagues by nominating them for an award, alternatively you could reward yourself, by applying for one of our overseas or annual conference bursaries...

FT digital newspaper clippings

Posted on February 05, 2010
The financial times recently announced that it is planning to extent its direct licence to include PDF's of newspaper articles through the Financial Times website.From the Financial Times corporate website "The Financial Times plans to extend its direct licence to include digital images of FT newspaper articles, which are currently licensed by the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA)...

Westlaw(what)Next

Posted on February 05, 2010
The big talk in the U.S at the moment is about the developments ThomsonReuters and LexisNexis are making to their databases. According to the New York Times, this is in response to "to lower-priced ? sometimes free ? rivals and arrive at a time when law firms are working to cut overheads"So what is happening? Well LexisNexis have kept their developments under wraps but ThomsonReuters have announced the development of Westlaw...

BIALLers in the News submissions

Posted on February 01, 2010
Have you have had anything published over the past few months? Whether it's a full-length article, a book review, or you have been quoted in some capacity, we'd like to hear from you. To continue to publicise the hard work of BIALL members, the PR & Promotions Committee produces a regular list of 'BIALLers in the News' to be published both in the Newsletter and on the website...

BIALL LinkedIn Group

Posted on January 29, 2010
As announced on the BIALL mailing list and LIS-LAW the BIALL PR & Promotions Committee have created a group on LinkedIn for BIALL members.The group currently has 47 members, so if you use LinkedIn why not sign up and see who you could connect with! The BIALL solos group also have their own group on LinkedIn, so if you work alone or in relative professional isolation why not sign up for this as well.

Legal Research Engine

Posted on January 16, 2010
Looking for a quick way to search the "legal web" you need look no further then a joint development between Cornell and Google, the result of which is the Cornell Legal Research EngineDescribed in more detail by the "Out of the Jungle" blog the site provides three search options:"* Legal Research Guides (prepared, usually by law libraries, to help explain how to do legal research in a particular area)* The Legal Internet (this is a broad area that can include anything from law firms' websites that can be information rich or poor,depending on how focused they are on marketing; non-profit organization and government sites, and non-governmental organizations websites all of which tend to be quite information-rich; education institutions which again can be rich sources of information; corporations and private entities, private individuals and miscellaneous sponsors of websites...

Predictions for 2010

Posted on January 14, 2010
What can we hope for during 2010? world peace, an end to the recession, finally running a marathon, actually the last one is mine...for something a little less personal why not check out the 3 Geeks and a Law blog post called "10 Projections for 2010 - The Year We All Hit the F5 Button"In the post they list their "projections" for 2010, interestingly it looks like several of these projections are definitely going to happen...

Innovations from LexisLibrary and Westlaw

Posted on January 12, 2010
LexisLibrary and Westlaw have been very busy over the holidays with LexisLibrary now offering an 'appeal tracker' and Westlaw offering prospective legislation.LexisLibrary Appeal TrackerIt is now possible to track cases which are appealable to the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal or to the Supreme Court...

Google Scholar: Will you be using it?

Posted on January 12, 2010
LLRX.com has published an interesting overview of how Google Scholar can be used to search for full-text opinions of US cases and articles from legal journals in "Google Scholar: A new way to search for cases and related legal publications"The article looks in detail at the coverage provided by Google Scholar, how it works, whether it's important and of course of most interest to anyone researching US law, whether it's useful.

Inner Temple and Middle Temple merger

Posted on December 11, 2009
The great news for anyone working at the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple is that their proposed merger, discussed in more detail in Proposed merger of Middle and Inner Temple Libraries is not going to happen.More detail on this announcement will be in the next BIALL newsletter.

The changing landscape of the information profession

Posted on December 02, 2009
Sara Batts from the BIALL Membership Committee and the blog Uncooked Data has published a review of the SLA Europe event "The changing landscape of the information profession" Sara was one of the panelists at this event, which also included Liz Blankson-Hemans from the SLA, Mark Jewell from Integreon and Laura Vosper from Lexis NexisThe BIALL blogger was unable to attend the event itself, but from what I hear it was a very well attended and informative event.

Should there be Library liaisons in other industries?

Posted on November 30, 2009
The Wikiman posts an interesting question in his latest blog post "what about having library liaisons in other industries?" In the post the Wikiman asks whether it would be mutually beneficial if there were closer ties between organisations like BIALL and CILIP...

Google makes free US caselaw available

Posted on November 18, 2009
Google announced yesterday that it will be making free US caselaw available on Google Scholar.All text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts will be included.It will also have value-added features such as links to related journal articles and other cited cases...

Should Westlaw and Lexis be like Google?

Posted on November 16, 2009
The Out of the Jungle blog has written an interesting post called "Why Westlaw and Lexis should not be like Google" in it they discuss why LexisNexis and Westlaw should not try to be more like Google.The post identifies a number of reasons why Google type searching would not be appropriate for tools like LexisNexis or Westlaw...

Online Information 2009 Conference on a Shoestring

Posted on November 12, 2009
If you don't have an extra £793 in your training budget, the free seminars at the Online Information Conference are still nothing to be sniffed at.From our own David Percik's negotiating tips to the Victoria & Albert Museum's open source CMS and SaaS success stories ...

Purchasing Power: A Legal Resources Purchasing Consortium?

Posted on October 29, 2009
As Ruth Bird posted on the Academic Law Librarian mail list:'Yesterday a focus group of academic law librarians met with representatives of Eduserv, a body that evolved from CHEST, which now undertakes Licence Negotiation Services in the Higher Education sector...

The ICLR & Youtube

Posted on October 26, 2009
Sara Batts of Uncooked Data has discovered a bit of a gem in "Always cited in preference" in her post she describes how the ICLR have launched a Youtube channel, which promotes and provides guidance on using the Law Reports they produce.There are five videos in total, of which our favourite has to be "A tale of two citations" we're wondering if this really does happen?

Justis goes ALL local!

Posted on October 26, 2009
As reported on the BIALL Solos/One Man Band blog in their post "Local Acts from Justis" Justis have entered into a joint venture with OPSI to increase the accessibility of local acts.This should significantly improve the availability of local acts, although they are already available on Westlaw, OPSI and the Statute Law Database (SLD)Interestingly Justis are asking for advice on how they should present these acts within Justis in their press release "Local acts from your local electronic publisher" so what do BIALL members think?

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