This Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture 2015, delivered by Professor Stephen Mayson2, explores the commercial evolution of law as a business, and draws attention to the disconnect between this development and continuing significant unmet need for legal services and prohibitively high fees for consumers and small businesses. The evolution is therefore supposed to be far from complete, and is hampered by the broken business model of law firms. A further shortcoming is the regulatory framework for legal services. Although this, too, has evolved in recent years with the introduction of the Legal Services Act 2007, the framework is nevertheless built on the still-complex and limiting structure of reserved activities, regulatory objectives and prescriptive detail. The author then explores the implications for information professionals, and highlights the opportunities for them to contribute to the development of ‘knowing management’, to the better education and training of legal practitioners, to helping them and their organisations address greater complexity and fluidity in regulation, and to harnessing market and client intelligence to improve the quality and relevance of legal services and the value of client relationships. The themes of cooperation, collaboration and connectivity underpin all of these opportunities, and contribute to the possibility of shaping and re-forming the role of the information professional in the 21st century.

The amount of physical space available is a vital issue for virtually all law libraries. In this article, Dunstan Speight, Library Manager at City law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner LLP, presents the issues involved in reducing and retaining library materials, to help library managers present a sound business case for maintaining the collection they need. Dunstan's experience is that of a law firm librarian, but it is hoped that much of what follows will also be relevant to librarians in other sectors.

Mark Pexton, of Herbert Smith Freehills LLP, provides a report on the findings of a survey into the use of Collection Development Policies (CDPs) and related collection development issues in law firm libraries. The survey was conducted during September 2014 and during the course of this article he provides an analysis of the benefits and difficulties of creating and implementing a CDP.

Loyita Worley discusses the need for librarians to promote library services more avidly within their organisations. She argues that providing a high quality information service to clients is not necessarily sufficient and that librarians need to give considerably more effort to promoting and branding their services, in the way that other teams in law firms already do. She looks at why librarians should brand, how they should do this and what they should brand. The perspective of the user is also taken into account and the importance of building trust and confidence with clients is identified as a key feature in the approach to branding and promotion.

This article by Allie Lustigman gives recommendations for creating a knowledge business strategy. The steps outlined are based upon the premise of using a strategy to review the information service and formulate a clear plan for the future function, particularly in terms of expanding the service; however, they can be applied to differing types of strategies. The article looks at various methods in which a review can be carried out and then outlines the strategy document itself, summarising the different sections that make up the document. Additionally, this article looks into the uses and benefits of creating a business strategy for the information professional.

This article by Rachel Brett highlights the key issues to be aware of when carrying out international company searches and reviews the information available online from the national company registries for some of the key European and offshore jurisdictions including: Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands.

The internet and the World Wide Web (www) has allowed the free flow of information across countries. Peter Martin and Tom Bruce from Cornell Law School pioneered the development of the ‘Free Access to Law Movement’ around the world. The Australian Legal Information Institute and various other Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) were established by adopting the Montreal Declaration at the Law via Internet Conference held in 2002. As a member of the United Nations, India adopted the UNESCO policy guidelines for the development and promotion of governmental public domain information. In India, the National Informatics Centre has played a leading role in supporting the maintenance and dissemination of Indian government public information that is useful for legal education, research and practice. This paper by Priya Rai, and Akash, gives a brief informative overview of the ‘free access to law movement’ resources pertaining to India. These resources have been categorised for easier understanding: parliamentary resources, legislative resources, case laws, law reform reports, international treaties and legal scholarship and journals. The article also provides an overview of the Legal Information Institute of India extending its contribution to disseminating Indian legal information.

Claire Greening explores some of the challenges that library and information professionals face when weighing up hard copy and online resources. Rather than trying to establish a preferred or ‘best’ format, this article instead explores the advantages that both formats have to offer and considers how they can co-exist within the law library. The article concludes with some questions to ask when purchasing and organising resources and explores some of the practical considerations to take into account regarding training.

This article is written by Paul Magrath who is the Head of Product Development and Online Content at the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales (ICLR). His article explores the issues surrounding the custodianship of those public legal documents, such as court judgments, which form primary sources of law but which may also contain private data, and looks at the way custodians of such data can also act as gatekeepers, enhancing or inhibiting access by the public as well as more specialised users. It expands upon an article published by Infolaw.co.uk entitled “Custodians and gatekeepers: maintaining access to public legal information”, and refers to recent case law involving the tension between information in the public domain and the individual's privacy and “right to be forgotten” by search engines. The article also looks at how court documents are made accessible in other jurisdictions and imagines how things might be improved in our own courts, before concluding that the model of a not-for-profit organisation, such as the ICLR or BAILII (the British and Irish Legal Information Institute), may work as well if not better than public or private management of judgments and other legal public information.

In this tenth anniversary year since freedom of information came into force north and south of the border, the authors, Calum Liddle and David McMenemy, undertake an in-depth comparative evaluation of the parallel cost exemptions found in the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002. Does Scottish FOI indeed afford a more generous disclosure entitlement? And are applicants, in turn, employing comparatively weaker rights when requesting information from analogous English and Welsh authorities? A statutory analysis of the home nation provisions is complemented by case law and a nod to contemporaneous events.