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The 80s: the Effect of the Growth in Law Firm Librarianship, IT and Legal Publishing on BIALL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2019

Christine Miskin

Extract

In the 1970s London law firms realised just how useful law librarians could be and there was a huge growth in their number during the 1980s. The first co-operative venture began in the mid-70s when we produced a Union List of Holdings and from that grew the City Law Librarians Group. By 1986 there were at least 60 firms in London employing over 150 professional law librarians. Provincial law firms were generally smaller but by the same date firms in Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester, Norwich and Bristol were employing law librarians.

Information

Type
BIALL’s 50th Anniversary: A Celebration
Information
Legal Information Management , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. 103 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Published by British and Irish Association of Law Librarians 

In the 1970s London law firms realised just how useful law librarians could be and there was a huge growth in their number during the 1980s. The first co-operative venture began in the mid-70s when we produced a Union List of Holdings and from that grew the City Law Librarians Group. By 1986 there were at least 60 firms in London employing over 150 professional law librarians. Provincial law firms were generally smaller but by the same date firms in Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester, Norwich and Bristol were employing law librariansFootnote 1.

This had a considerable effect on the membership of BIALL. In 1969 membership stood at 47 personal and institutional members only one of whom was from a law firm library, by 1999 the total membership was 720 of whom 344 worked in law firmsFootnote 2 (As a comparison, in 2019 the total membership figure has decreased a little and stands at 634 members, including approximately 120 working in the academic sector and 250 from law firms).

A key milestone for BIALL was the establishment in 1984/85 of the BIALL/PCL Course entitled English Law for Law Librarians. It was designed specifically for law librarians who did not have a formal qualification in law and was run by lecturers in the Faculty of Law of the Polytechnic. The first course had 26 participants, was a great success and is still running todayFootnote 3.

Huge strides were taken in the development of IT, mainly in publishing, but also in its use within law libraries. The first Conference devoted only to IT took place in 1985 and on this occasion Professor David Thomas (op cit) presented a paper on ‘The “Paperless Law Library” in the United States’ which was somewhat ahead of its timeFootnote 4.

The Association received considerable support from the publishers during the 1980s including sponsorship of the annual conference and bursaries for British and Irish law librarians to go to overseas conferences. Traditional book publishing was dominated by Butterworths and Sweet & Maxwell, but smaller publishers such as Professional Books, Lloyds of London Press, and Tolleys thrived. The end of the decade heralded the use of CD-ROMS and ‘electronic mail’ by legal publishers and law firms.

A very early entrant in the database field was POLIS (Parliamentary Online Information Service) which became operational in the House of Commons in 1980.

LEXIS had first been introduced in the UK in 1979. It had a fairly disastrous start with the huge purpose built terminals of the time frequently failing to workFootnote 5. The first demonstration the author attended, probably in 1980, involved searches on the concept of ‘reservation of title’, which was of great importance at the time. It produced only cases on Indian reservations!Footnote 6

In 1979 EUROLEX, a database run by the European Law Centre was launched. The director was Norman Nunn-Price, an early computer visionary. Following its take-over by Lexis in 1985, he went on to establish Context Legal Systems, owners of JUSTIS, later Justis Publishing Limited, a very successful independent company for many years, which has just been taken over by vLex.

Legal Journals Index published by Legal Information Resources first appeared in hard-copy in 1986 and resulted from an idea of the author, who at the time was indexing European journal articles on catalogue cards in a law firm library, that a searchable index to articles in all legal journals would be an extremely useful tool. The information was held on a database and it quickly became available electronically. It is now owned by Thomson Reuters.

References

Footnotes

1 Miskin, Christine ‘Perception and Projection of the Library's Image in the Law Firm’. (1987) The Law Librarian 18(1), pp 2–6Google Scholar.

2 Blake, Mary. A History of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians 1969–1999. [Warwick], BIALL, 2000, Chapter 8Google Scholar: Membership.

3 Polytechnic of Central London.

4 BIALL Conference Papers on Information Technology and Law Libraries, (1986) The Law Librarian, 17(1).

5 In 1985 Raper, Diane wrote …“a number of law firms now have Lexis but it is generally accepted that their use is not high volume. Neither is it very logical….” (1986) The Law Librarian 17(1) 26–29Google Scholar. She also remembers attending the first ever training session in the UK: “We all sat there like lemons as the dial up modem couldn't make a connection. It was all too complex for the average City lawyer to understand”.

6 The key case was Aluminium Industrie Vaassen BV v Romalpa Aluminium Ltd [1976] 1 W.L.R. 676 where it was decided that title to goods does not pass to the buyer until stated conditions are fulfilled notwithstanding delivery of the goods to the buyer.