We explore how lawyers can stay updated with the latest legal news, looking at creating RSS feeds, utilising browsers, trialling legal research platforms, attending events, and more.
Successful lawyers need to stay up to date with the latest information. And there is lots of information. Lawyers need to keep up with caselaw, digest legislative and regulatory changes, understand political and economic developments, and grasp any shifts in their practice area and the wider sector. And, on top of all that, lawyers need to keep up with the recent interpretation and analysis of all the above.
Staying updated is no mean feat, especially in a sector as complex as the legal sector. But there are various methods that can help you refine, filter, and improve the news that you receive, streamlining your gathering and interpretation processes. In this article, we offer some best practice advice to help lawyers stay up to date and master the art of news gathering, analysis, and interpretation.
There are lots of ways to gather information online. The first (and by far the simplest) is to sign up for a daily newsletter. There are and many are specific enough to meet your needs, whatever they may be. The downside is that the content is selected by an individual (or team) and thus the news you consume may prove subjective and selective.
Another simple way is using your – essentially a placeholder for commonly used items – to gather news. You can ‘favourite’ all the most important websites, reflecting the intricacies of your needs. You can create folders to segment the news you need to access at any given time, such as: General News, Practice Area, Law Firms, Business of Law, and so on. And, if you like the bookmark bar, you can that provide additional functionality to optimise bookmark management.
The bookmark bar should include websites covering general legal news, so that you’re up to date on sector changes, economic and legislative shifts, and so on. You can start with the below:
A similar but more comprehensive route involves the creation of (RSS) feeds. RSS feeds provide a quick way for you to read the latest updates. Most prominent websites will give the option of signing up to an RSS feed, so that when a news article or summary is posted referring to your specified needs, you’ll receive a direct update (usually an email) alerting you to the new information.
Perhaps the most comprehensive route to news gathering is using a legal research tool. Take Lexis+® UK, for example. The platform offers quick and easy answers to questions and provides a constant stream of leading legal content. And, importantly, Lexis+® UK allows users to filter the news, meaning they’ll only find content relevant to their practice area – or a specific part of the practice area. You can also set up alerts from the platform, which means you’ll receive the latest news directly, so that you can keep up to date in close to real-time, checking out the latest need-to-know information on the go.
News gathering is a daily task. But staying up to date with legal news demands a little more action, namely interpretation, analysis, and contextualisation. In short, succesful lawyers will need to dig a little deeper. And lots of places online provide free-of-charge, in-depth, and engaging options.
are a great place to start. These often provide sustained analysis of developments in the sector, providing lawyers with key takeaways. Webinars and workshops often allow attendees to ask questions, meaning lawyers can find out details about developments.
Law firms regularly run webinars and workshops themselves, sometimes covering caselaw they’ve been involved with, and many and legal institutions also host brilliant webinars on broader issues. Some of the best ones include:
A more informal option is podcasts. These are a fantastic resources for interpreting the latest legal news, providing a quick and accessible analysis of the latest trends and topics. Podcasts benefit from interactivity, offering dialogic elements that tend to yield more fruitful insights than articles or blogs.
The best legal podcasts tackle the latest caselaw, the interaction between politics and the law, topical issues that are dominating news feeds, and so much more. Some favourites include:
And, finally, events provide a place for even more in-depth conversations, involving many people. Picking events depends on keeping updated with various calendars. You can do that, quite simply, by subscribing to event emails and newsletters, following legal organisations on social media, and checking event pages online. Some of the best places to discover upcoming events are as follows:
The above options are focussed on the interpretation of legal news. That’s an essential requirement for lawyers, as they need to not only know what’s happening in their field, but understand why it’s happening, the immediate ramifications of what happened, and what could happen next. The above options support that process and help lawyers to contextualise legal news.
* denotes a required field
0330 161 1234