Following the intense interest generated within the legal information profession by the acquisition of Lawtel announced by Sweet & Maxwell on August 2, 2002, the Editorial Board asked Wendy Beecham to grant us an interview to enable her to communicate to us the rationale behind the takeover. Wendy very kindly agreed to speak to me and the following is a report of our conversation, which covered not just Lawtel, but also included a follow-up to the interview Wendy gave to Laurence Eastham shortly after she became Managing Director of Sweet & Maxwell in I 999, and published in the Law Librarian.

CEM: Could you give us some background information on the Lawtel service, please?

So Lawtel has become part of the ever-growing empire that is Sweet & Maxwell. Their duopoly with Butterworths extends and the poor librarian has one less independent place to go to for information. But the question is, how will this affect us in our daily lives? Will we see this very good service swallowed up and become part of Westlaw or will it remain functioning independently?

When news first arrived in my e-mail from a member of Lis-Law that Lawtel had been taken over by Sweet and Maxwell, I was concerned because I felt that one of our most useful services would be absorbed into the large corporate publisher's long list of products.

My first contact with the Lawtel service was when we initiated a trial of the database for the Law School at the University of Birmingham in the mid-1990s. Following that trial we decided not to subscribe – a decision which seemed to confound the sales representative at the time. However, about nine to twelve months later we had a second trial. This was largely “encouraged” by new members of staff who had joined the School in the intervening period and by the fact that the service had been revamped and relaunched. Following that trial we took out a subscription. My own continuing inclination was not to subscribe. But there was enough of a feeling in the School at that time for me to accept the wishes of my academic colleagues. I have subsequently moved to the University of Nottingham Law School and although we also subscribe, some of the reasons that influenced my decision not to want to subscribe to the service persist today and they are as follows.

Sweet & Maxwell's acquisition of Lawtel has certainly caused librarians some concerns. The legal sector has rarely seen so many mergers and takeovers, having reached almost the point of a true anti-trust duopoly operating. Concerns have been expressed about the concentration of market power between Sweet & Maxwell and Butterworths. This article examines some of the competition law issues which arise.

Last year in Cork when I added my voice to that of BIALL's incoming chairman to encourage attendance at the 2002 conference at Liverpool, I reminded delegates that Liverpool would be a return to the venue of BIALL's first conference. This announcement met with reactions ranging from “so what”, “not another anniversary” to a fascination with what it was like in the “olden days”. Gradually BIALL's Chair and others (Brian Murray of Legal Library Services in particular) persuaded me to give a session at the conference. Brian was insistent that Liverpool 1970 was part of the heritage of BIALL members and that they ought to be reminded of it from time to time. I should like to acknowledge help in preparing this paper from Mary Blake and Derek Way and the invaluable aide memoire of Mary Blake's history of BIALL (Blake, 2000).

Whilst preparing for my talk at the BIALL Conference and bearing in mind the session during which I was speaking, it struck me how many things had changed since I started out in law librarianship. The foremost of these is definitely the development of information technology, which has had an immediate and prolonged impact on how we provide services to our users in both law firms and in academic libraries. This is something of which we are all aware – the shift from paper, firstly to CD Rom, then online and latterly to internet based services.

‘Transactional learning’ at its simplest means learning from doing transactions. When professionals learn they often do so, as Donald Schön reminds us, by learning from within transactions – ‘knowing-in-action’. By this Schön means that professionals solve problems by constructing for themselves a repertoire of precedents, images and remembered actions. Problems are not solved by using rules alone, but are framed or constructed according to the repertoire. Professionals try out solutions for fit, re-frame, feed back to themselves, try out other solutions. The result is what Schön calls ‘;reflection-in-action’. According to him, this is what produces the doctor's “feel’ for a specific diagnosis, or a lawyer's ‘feel’ for a case, (Schon 1983).

E-learning – is it all it's made out to be? Does it deliver what it promises? In this article, I hope to convince you that it does? I'll explain why, as Head of Resource Development for the Retail Branch Networks for the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, I believe it has proved successful. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and National Westminster (NW) Branch Networks consist of over 2,300 branches employing approximately 30,000 people throughout the U.K. My team are responsible for the design, development and implementation of training and development for these staff. We consider that in today's climate of accelerated change, high performance depends critically on the extent to which our intellectual capital is built, refreshed and leveraged – why?

Our customers expect that, as a minimum, our people are appropriately trained and can handle all their enquiries efficiently and effectively. Competent staff and the delivery of excellent customer service are not an option for the Group, but a necessity if we are to sustain our competitive advantage in the financial market place.

One thing I learned is when an old friend [Carswell's Bonnie Preece] calls inviting you to be the rapporteur of an event that will take place months in the future, particularly when she importunes you with the carrot that you will not have to prepare anything in advance of the conference, DO NOT SUCCUMB. I subsequently discovered that the task of marshalling the substance of more than a dozen hours of outstanding presentations is a challenge indeed. I had to actually attend every session; I had to furiously take notes for hours; I had to work late into the night to consolidate these woefully inadequate notes. Whatever their limitations, however, I offer them here as some record of this marvellously well executed and educational programme.

My trip to British Columbia to attend the Third Joint Study Institute in May this year has definitely been one of the highlights of my career so far! After applying for and successfully receiving a BIALL overseas bursary I had the most fantastic opportunity to hop across the globe and embark on a fascinating and challenging journey into Canadian law and history! I thought I would share a selection of the most memorable moments of the trip with you.

Wow! when I opened the letter to find I had won another bursary I could not believe my luck. Five years ago I had gone to the Canadian Law Librarians' Conference in New Brunswick and had had a brilliant time. On this occasion it was the Joint Study Institute of the three law library associations, held at Victoria, Vancouver, British Columbia. Aynsley's report has outlined the highlights of the lectures. I am approaching it from a slightly different and more personal angle.

On 18th April 2002, I found myself on a flight to Chicago. My ultimate destination was Madison, Wisconsin, and I would be spending the next month at the University of Wisconsin's Law Library. This article gives me the opportunity to share some of my experiences, as well as outlining the benefits of this type of professional development opportunity.

This well-attended full-day seminar on 22 April 2002 was held at the British Library Conference Centre, a comfortable venue with space for a small exhibition by the main legal information providers separate from the auditorium. It was organised jointly by BIALL and SCOOP (Standing Committee on Official Publications). Speakers included Sarah Carter (University of Kent), Alan Pawsey of HMSO, Tony Hopkins from the Statutory Publications Office and Joe Ury, Executive Director of BAILII. The afternoon focused on the commercial providers of legal information, providing a forum for speakers from Context, Westlaw UK, LEXIS and Lawtel.

This was the first time that I had attended EBIC, so I didn't quite know what to expect. When I received the preliminary information on the conference I put it on one side wondering whether it warranted the expenditure required, but when I had a chance to look at it properly I really liked what I saw and realised that it would be very pertinent to my job as it is now. The conference appeared to be a nice balance between knowledge and information strategies, technology and information delivery and leadership and management – all areas in which I am very interested. Also, the structure appealed to me – a combination of panel, plenary and breakout sessions.

The basic resource is the Lord Chancellor's Department with the full text of the CPR, practice directions, schedules and pre-action protocols available in Word, pdf and html formats. The major advantage of this resource is its currency, with updated versions appearing here first. The opening page provides clear information on the latest changes and when they come into force. Consultation papers on civil matters are also provided in full.

This paper provides a brief introduction to caLIM, the Current Awareness for Legal Information Managers (http://193.62.18.223/dbtw-wpd/textbase/cadquery.htm) web database developed at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London and made freely available on the IALS Web site.