They say that everyone has a book in them. But how do lawyers and other legal professionals go about getting published? How does the publishing process work and what are the benefits of being published? This article by Sian O'Neill of Globe Law and Business outlines the benefits of being published and how the process works, including generating new ideas, approaching a publisher and the publishing proposal, as well as the production process and what authors can expect in terms of marketing.

Masoud Gerami, Managing Director of vLex Justis, and Aidan Hawes, Head of Commercial Development, discuss the development and launch of the new vLex Justis platform. They describe the process of making decisions behind the content and features available on the platform, and how these will be continually enhanced in the future. They also discuss the global circumstances the platform was launched within and share their goal of meeting customer needs in a future which will bring new ways of working.

Wolters Kluwer is a global provider of professional information, software solutions, and services for customers in more than 180 countries. It employs approximately 19,000 people worldwide and has annual revenues of €4.6 billion of which 89% are derived from digital products and services. The company's roots can be traced back to the nineteenth century and to the merger of four entrepreneurial, family-run Dutch publishing houses: Wolters, Noordhoff, Samsom, and Kluwer. Throughout its 184-year history, Wolters Kluwer has adapted to a significant amount of environmental, cultural, and technological change, not the least of which was digitalization. It expanded internationally through numerous acquisitions and moved deeper into data and analytics. The company's four operational divisions - Health, Tax & Accounting, Governance Risk & Compliance and Legal & Regulatory - now aim together to achieve goals under a strategy entitled Accelerating Our Value. Those goals are three-fold: to grow expert solutions, to advance deep domain expertise and to drive operational agility. Today Wolters Kluwer is a data-driven, highly customer-experience-focused organization that continues to apply advanced technologies to complex problems. The author, David Bartolone, VP and General Manager, for the International Group within Wolters Kluwer's Legal and Regulatory, U.S. unit, describes Wolters Kluwer's history as well as the current organizational structure, and vision for the future. In addition, he draws upon his recent experience to describe Wolters Kluwer's international legal business.

In this article, John Sinkins, Chairman of Wildy & Sons Ltd, outlines a brief history of the company and how his family have been involved since 1895. It describes how the company has evolved, particularly since the turn of the millennium. He describes his personal journey and that of the company since he joined in 1968, more than 50 years ago.

In this article, James Harper of LexisNexis UK outlines the company's bi-centenary, and its contribution to the ‘rule of law’. The article will describe the fascinating development of UK law during this period, focusing on key milestones in arguably the largest and most exponential increase in the quantity of English language law the world has seen. It will also outline the range of legal industry innovations which LexisNexis and its companies have spearheaded over the years.

In this article, Barry Vickery explains the history of InfoTrack during his tenure as General Manager of Corporate Services, and outlines the reasons for their success. Barry will discuss the world of technology and how, by understanding the blend of law firms’ needs, customer insight and technology, InfoTrack are disrupting the legal market.

In this article, Masoud Gerami, Managing Director, and Aidan Hawes, Head of Commercial Development, offer an exploration of the history of Justis, and the influence the company has had on the delivery of legal information over its 30-year history. They describe the development of technology over this time, from the rise of optical media through to the features offered by today's online legal research technology, focusing on Justis’ key milestones over this period. They discuss the range of innovations Justis has been responsible for, the changes in the legal research industry, and offer an insight into the future aspirations of the company.

In this article Wirt Soetenhorst explores a paradigm shift that is already taking place in the legal education market and that will accelerate over the next five years. This development will have consequences for all the parties that are active in the field of academic legal education: authors, institutions, libraries, students and publishers. The article analyses the current traditional business model (the sale of physical textbooks) and outlines several potential scenarios for the future of legal publishing in which publishers move into teaching and academic institutions.

This article, written by Renate Ní Uigín, provides an overview of the Irish law publishing market today. It discusses the nature of Irish law, potential purchasers and the principal publishers.

Law publishing in Scotland has seen something of a renaissance during the last 20 years. This article by Margaret Cherry is an overview of Scots law publishing from a Scottish perspective. It looks at the factors which influence publishing decisions, including market and economic considerations and the nature of Scots law itself. It also covers the principal publishers – both past and current – who have produced books on Scots law.

This article by Thomas Shaw discusses the key findings of an MSc dissertation which examined legal information professionals' perceptions of what facilitates, and what impedes, the use of free and paid-for legal information resources. It also compares and contrasts the views of information professionals working in academia with those working in law firms. It is situated in the context of significant criticism of commercial legal publishing and the existence of many resources providing free legal information.

Roger Cook met Karen on 27 November 2006, at the behest of the chair of the Editorial Board, to try and clear up some of the issues relating to the new LexisNexis Butterworths platform and to hear about some of the developments which will be happening during 2007. You will probably have seen some of these already, given the lead time between the interview taking place and the publication of this edition of LIM. He had been given some specific questions which had been raised by members of BIALL, but the conversation ranged beyond these to other areas.