Angela Donaldson describes the process of developing an online environment in which to deliver legal information skills to undergraduate LLB students.

The Bar Vocational Course, which all potential barristers must complete, emphasises the importance of legal research skills. Mark Haines from BPP College outlines its current structure and heralds the arrival of the new Bar Professional Training Course

Tony Simmonds describes the initiatives taken at the College of Law to assist students to perform effective practical legal research including a Legal Method foundation course; a vocational course for the Legal Practice Course and additional in house learning activities devised by the information professionals.

Maria Mawson explores the extent to which universities still teach undergraduates how to use print legal research sources. It also examines the level to which these sources are still provided, in the light of increasing costs, shrinking budgets and the convenience of online access.

In this philosophical article John Eaton from the University of Manitoba recounts the current legal education system in Canada and reflects on the issues involved in teaching legal research skills, including problems with where to base the training within the curriculum, and difficulties encountered in the migration from hard copy research, to current students' predilections for using electronic sources. Whilst based on the Canadian process his article has a wider application in relation to the “Google-generation” of students.

Natalie Wieland, who teaches legal research skills, reflects on her own experiences as a law student undertaking legal research using only paper-based searches and compares them with her current experiences training completely digitally-aware law students in a world heavily biased towards electronic resources.

Alison Pope, Keith Puttick and Geoff Walton have been involved in the information literacy aspects of a project to help students improve their research skills and they report on this and the wider current debates on information literacy with an emphasis throughout on legal research skills.

At large City firm Herbert Smith, the legal research training programme for trainee solicitors is taken very seriously and includes a compulsory training course in their first two weeks, followed by research exercises and further courses which have been carefully designed in association with the partners to ensure that trainees qualify with excellent legal research skills.

Gail Boelens discusses how library and research training is delivered in a large Australian law firm. She also considers some of the challenges involved, including dealing with multiple jurisdictions, databases using different operating platforms and having adequate resources to develop and deliver training.

This article reviews the kinds of resources available to support the training of legal researchers and to guide them in their research, so that law librarians can avoid “re-inventing the wheel”. Karen Crouch places her emphasis on practical legal research. She also highlights some work in progress and possible future directions for legal learning resources and reviews some of the online tools that enable legal researchers to work more efficiently. The emphasis is on low cost resources, and those which enable additional value to be extracted from existing legal database subscriptions.

Developing legal research skills is something that takes time and practice and can be enhanced with proper training. Marcie M. Baranich explores the various resources that HeinOnline offers to help law librarians and legal researchers develop their research skills in HeinOnline, from training guides and video tutorials to live webinars and support, together with the platforms and social media applications used to disseminate training resources, including the Wiki, Blog, YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter feed.

In a response to issues raised at User Groups on the research capabilities of young lawyers, Tom Laidlaw of LexisNexis looked into the current legal skills environment and as a result LexisNexis have introduced the LawCampus website for students and are planning a programme for trainee solicitors involving “virtual mentors”.

Tax, national insurance, tax credits and the minimum wage are often difficult to understand. Those with questions frequently turn to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) for answers, but the HMRC website is often out-of-date and confusing. Last year, Anne Redston launched the Cobweb Campaign to sweep out the dusty corners of this huge information database.

This article by Dr Peter Clinch, Senior Subject Librarian for Law, Cardiff University, provides a brief background to, and reprints a part of, the latest revision of the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) document: A Library for the Modern Law School: the Statement of Standards for University Law Library Provision in the United Kingdom. Dr Clinch was a member of the Working Party responsible for revising the standards and he adds comments describing current practices relating to the standards.

The Financial Services and Markets Department is one of 11 main departments at City law firm Travers Smith LLP. Shirley Lofthouse, Head of Information at Travers Smith, considers the work of the financial services lawyer and the resources needed to support the research requirements of the department.

Suzanna Rickeard and Anne Coles describe the five key stages involved in devising a successful induction programme, based on their experiences at Lawrence Graham, a large London firm of solicitors and offer helpful hints on what any potential problem areas.

A vendor launches what they promise to be a fantastic new product which you can not do without so you set up a trial. At the end of the trial you have lots of well-balanced feedback from across your organisation that you can use to determine whether or not to take the product and which also gives you some points for negotiation. Well, that is the theory anyway! In this article Chrissy Street aims to give some guidance about how to get closer to this in practice.