My Favourite Tipples from a Library Manager in a Global Law Firm
Jinfo Blog

By Fiona Fogden

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Fiona Fogden, library manager for EMEA at Reed Smith LLP. She shares her favourite online resources in areas from homeworking to digital information curation and reliable sources of guidance & information.

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After years where research was a small part of my role I am back in the hot seat loving doing up to 50% research each day. I work in a commercial law firm where our shipping department are our most prolific customers.

• Equasis: Used regularly for information about ships and shipping companies. Registration is free and it is simple to use. For more complex queries we use sources such as Lloyd's List Intelligence where we can interrogate ship movements in specific time frames and specific locations. It's amazing how nerdy you can get about ships and vessels (just as an aircraft is not always a plane, the same with a vessel not always being a ship)!

• The Insolvency pages of the London Gazette: I use these for checking all those businesses and individuals, often used alongside other services such as Legalinx's or CRO's Winding-Up Court service that will send you a report on any pending winding up orders against a company for a modest fee. The changes at Companies House are very interesting and we are having to be cautious about using the new free Companies House Beta site which is simple to use but still has gaps.

• BIALL-Wiki: This is an excellent mine of information and to keep in touch with legal trends and updates I also tap into the email forums of lis-law and BIALL. 

• Google Docs: A cross over between work and home are the Google Doc tools, especially the forms feature that allows you to build easy questionnaires and get the results in a Google sheet. Fantastic for organising the menu options for 30 people in a local association, as well as getting feedback on library services.

For fun: 

• In my life outside libraries I have recently obsessed with schools and entrance exams. I am amazed that I spend so much time on the Eleven Plus forum. For chilling out, I resort to two popular apps: Colorfy which gives me an easy excuse to be a child and my Bible app which gives me the option to read my chosen passage in traditional King James, modern Good News and others. 

An article in FreePint I found particularly interesting:

• Procurement is a subject close to my heart, having delivered training courses on negotiating and also written a book on the subject and I was interested to read "Research on UK Legal Purchasing Preferences and Needs 2015", views from the UK Top 200 legal firms.
  
  It is always interesting to see how your experiences either mirror or differ from those of colleagues in similar roles. The report focuses on the "big two" publishers in the legal sector. This is helpful but with Reed Smith having a very large number of separate subscriptions outside of these two, information resourcing is far more complex than can sometimes appear. It also never ceases to amaze me how many law firm librarians there are - most of the firms who contributed to the survey will have an information team, all providing highly valued services. It makes for good networking, developing of ideas and professional development.

Contribute Your "My Favourite Tipples"

Would you like to share your "My Favourite Tipples" with the FreePint audience? For contributor guidelines email catherine.dhanjal@freepint.com or visit the Publish with FreePint page.

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