This article by Isabelle Brenneur-Garel, President of Juriconnexion and its working group, ‘Journée’1, focuses on the Juriconnexion association's annual conference, held on 21 January 2021 by videoconference. The choice of topic was motivated by the recent pandemic: changes to legal information and work in times of crisis. How have professionals navigated this ongoing crisis? What coping strategies have they developed? What does the future hold? More than twenty speakers from academia, legal publishing, legal associations and networks, and the legal and legal-related professions shared their experiences with members of the working group.

In this article Ian Hunter considers his experiences, learning points and recommendations on running an international law firm research service from home for 6 months, after being sent home at one hour's notice. In the article he considers working from home, including the psychological benefits of having a ‘journey’ to work, providing a research service and a library service, managing a team and the use of communications technology.

In this article, three members of the BIALL Publications Committee, Katy Davies, Kate Manning and Jude Wilson, relate their experience of lockdown in their working environments and mention some of the ways that the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL), as a professional organisation, has been supporting its members.

This article represents a summary of the plenary session that Barry Vickery presented to delegates at the 2018 BIALL Conference in Birmingham. It explored the changing role of technology in a range of different markets and showed how different management styles, attitudes and strategies have created very different outcomes for those respective companies. Those that have chosen to ignore technology have generally suffered, fallen behind the competition and in ever increasing numbers, gone bust. Parallels were drawn between these companies and professional services today. Are there lessons we can take from these failures that we can use in our working life, even in our personal lives, or do we just keep our head down and convince ourselves that ‘We've always done it this way’?

This paper, written by Gemma John and based on her keynote address at BIALL's 49th Annual Study Conference held in Birmingham in June 2018, explores the value of offices and libraries as spaces for meeting, sharing and learning in a moment when new technology enables individuals to access information anywhere, anytime, at the click of a mouse. Drawing on first-hand material from research, policy and projects, it explores the transformation of offices and libraries as workspaces, and the place of offices in the library and of libraries in the office. It focuses on how both offices and libraries are being designed for productivity as the boundary between work and home begins to blur in the United Kingdom.

This article developed from a talk delivered by the authors, Timonie Green and Diane Miller, at the BIALL Annual Conference in June 2018, whereby they looked at how the Library and Information Services in both of their firms have managed a move to agile working. Withers, at the time, were deep in preparations for the move, whilst Gowling WLG had been working agilely for some time. The hope is that by telling these stories, and talking about the issues encountered, some pointers and ideas can be given to other firms facing the challenge.

Dawn Jones discusses the findings from an in-house project looking at how agile and flexible working can be successfully adopted by legal and business professionals. It is based on information gained from speaking to those with agile and flexible working already entrenched in their businesses, external consultants who advise on this change of working habits and internal teams and individuals who are already exercising agile and flexible working (albeit in a non-formal way). It is a high level guide to start thought processes around the differences between agile and flexible working, the people, the offices and the finances.

This article by Karen Waldron describes the experiences of LexisNexis in implementing Agile as a framework in product development and across the organisation. It discusses the principles of Agile, the aims of LexisNexis of greater collaboration, quicker delivery of value to customers and continuous improvement, the main activities introduced, and the benefits experienced at LexisNexis as a result. It also discusses the applicability of Agile as a framework outside of software development, as the goals are common to most organisations, and sets out the view that incorporating simple agile activities into current working practices can have incremental and short term benefit for most teams.