About the Lawbore Family of Sites

Lawbore: The Complete Law Portal

Lawbore runs a family of sites which include a link directory, multimedia tutorials site, a blog, an e-learning hub, an events calendar and a legal design gallery. Here, we provide a quick breakdown of its content, along with a history of its development (humour us…!)

1) Link Directory – your topic-by-topic Web guide

Emily has hand-picked the choicest links to key websites, blogs and documents, so you can hit the ground learning. With over 1000 entries split across no less than 38 legal topics, our guides are the perfect place to begin researching an assignment.

2) Learnmore – Multimedia law skills tutorials

Inside the Learnmore head you'll find talking slideshows, articles, video guides and interactive presentations written and composed by knowledgable lecturers, librarians and alumni.

3) Future Lawyer – Our careers and alumni blog

The Future Lawyer blog features articles and opinion from across the legal sphere, as well as event reviews and interviews with successful alumni. It's an ideal entry point to the wider world of law careers.

4) City Hub – News and databases for our own students

The City Hub is where we collect all the school news, events, useful links, databases, e-journals and the like. Plus it's got your book needs covered with a visual carousel of our law library's latest acquisitions.

5) Legal Events Calendar

Here's where you find all the events going on around legal London. This isn't just at City, but at other universities, institutions, law firms and sets of chambers.

6) TLDR Legal Gallery

Our gallery for the best in the burgeoning field of legal design.

Our Origins

Name that year!

The Euro went into circulation, the Queen was celebrating her Golden Jubilee, Brazil won the World Cup... oh, and equally momentously (for us) the then City University law librarian Emily Allbon first registered the domain name lawbore.net – the year? 2002!

There were a few legal portals around at the time but they were either too brief or too detailed in their source descriptions to appeal to undergraduates. Emily felt that a new site based around the modules being studied would give students confidence to research online and broaden their reading.

From its humble beginnings as solely a link directory, Lawbore soon took off as a popular and well-used resource. New features were added regularly, many of which have come and gone in the intervening years. These have included a chat forum, alumni link-up site, law textbook marketplace, individual course news feeds, and a professional courses focussed spin-off directory.

One main site gradually split off into several different sub-sites, each with a different focus, but a common look and philosophy, as we found we couldn't fit everything all into one.

Lawbore recently

Future Lawyer blog

In the last decade the focus shifted to law careers. Massively increased competition for any form of work experience for law students made Emily want to help students start earlier on planning their futures. She made contact with a lot of alumni and started the Future Lawyer blog, to include interviews with alumni, articles and useful career-based law news.

The earliest items included: an interview with the lawyer for the Glastonbury Festival (a City alumni), a reflection on the GDL, insights into commercial awareness and an account of working to represent those on death row.

Later as the blog grew in popularity, we engaged the services of illustrator Adam Doughty to give the site a fresh look.

Learning more with interactive media

Teaming up with Sanmeet Kaur Dua, who was then a lecturer in Law at City, Emily created Learnmore in 2010 – a home for multimedia and e-learning materials. Central to the Learnmore philosophy was making a site which would appeal with plenty of visuals and interactivity.

Mooting was a big focus - we filmed hours and hours of our students in action in order to create a range of resources to make this potentially scary pastime more approachable. We placed a big emphasis on getting students involved in the creation of content as much as possible.

Over the almost two decades of Lawbore we have constantly been redoing the livery and layout of Lawbore to match the changing technology, accessibility and learning needs of the students, as well as to update the style visually to keep it looking fresh and relevant.

Academic References

Lawbore has for many years attracted a lot of interest from both law students and those working within the field of legal information. Emily has been lucky enough to have been asked to spread the Lawbore word by giving papers at various conferences, seminars and events, both in the UK and the US.

If you're interested in finding out more about Lawbore's origins, its development or indeed its creator then check out the following articles:

• Allbon, E. (2013) Too cool for (law) school? Using technology to engage students in legal skills, European Journal of Law and Technology 4(1)
• Allbon, E. & Kaur Dua, S. (2012) Legal skills: ensuring 'appy students. Legal Information Management, 12(4), 266-272
• Allbon, E. (2011) Innovative involvement not embarrassing imitation: Using technology to connect with students without treading on virtual toes. Legal Information Management, 9(4), 240-245

• Allbon, E. (2011) From Black and White to Colour; Educating and Engaging the Screen Addicts of 2011. Legal Information Management, 11, 226-232

• Allbon, E. & Wakefield, N. (2008) Staying vital to the virtual learner: what role for future academic law librarians? Legal Information Management, 8(1), 18-23 :
• Allbon, E. (2005) IT'S ALIVE! The birth of Lawbore and the indispensability of the law librarian, Legal Information Management, 5(4), 211-215

On Learnmore, TLDR Gallery and visual learning

• Allbon, E. (2019). Changing mindsets: encouraging law teachers to think beyond text. Journal of Open Access to Law, 7(1).
• Allbon, E. (2018). Beyond text: exploiting the visual in law. Australian Law Librarian, 26(2), pp. 54–63.
• Allbon, E. (2016). Seeing is believing: We are all converging. Law Teacher, 50(1), pp. 44–60.
  
• Allbon, E. (2016). Connecting with clients - what tools work? Australian Law Librarian, 23(1), pp. 4–13.

Accolades and awards

Emily has been thrilled to receive so much positive feedback about the Lawbore resource. Here's a selection of some of the accolades she and Lawbore have received over the years:

• Emily named Best Academic Legal Information Professional for her work on Lawbore at the BIALL/LexisNexis Awards for Excellence in 2005.
• Emily received a Student Voice Award (nominated by students) in 2011 Emily given the Worshipful Company of Saddlers Robert Kitchin Award (given to one member of City University London staff every year) for her outstanding contribution to the University in 2012.
• Emily's paper (Too cool for (law) school: Using technology to engage students in legal skills) was given the HEA Award for Best Legal Education and Technology Paper at the BILETA Annual Conference 2012.
• At the BIALL Conference 2012 Emily was named 'BIALL/Wildy Law Librarian of the Year'.
• Emily and a colleague Sanmeet Kaur Dua presented with the Routledge/ALT Teaching Law with Technology Prize in 2013.
• Emily was named one of 55 National Teaching Fellows by the HEA in 2013 for excellence in learning and teaching support.

Reviews of Lawbore

Some journals have also reviewed Lawbore. Here are a couple of excerpts which we have been able to provide as PDFs:

• UKCLE Directions Issue 18 excerpt
• The Law Teacher July 2011 excerpt

Write for us!

Be published on the UK's top student law portal

We're always looking for people to volunteer new content for our pages. That could be a teaching article, talking slideshow or video for our Learnmore pages, or an alumni interview or column piece for our careers blog Future Lawyer.

If you think you could contribute something to Lawbore, please don't hesitate to contact Emily Allbon at e.allbon@city.ac.uk with your idea.

Credits and Contact

Conceptualisation and Content

Lawbore is conceptualised, edited and run by Emily Allbon , Associate Professor of Law at The City Law School, City, University of London.

Design and Development

Since 2004 Lawbore is designed and developed in PHP / MySQL / HTML5 / JS by Howard Richardson, a freelance web developer.

Artwork

Original Lawbore hand-drawn artwork for was commissioned from talented Texan artist Kat Marshello, and for Future Lawyer and the Events Calendar from the amazing Adam Doughty.

Image Credits

Images used in-line in Learnmore and Future Lawyer articles are usually available under Creative Commons and attributed individually on each page. Additional images have been licenced from 123rf.com and istockphoto.com.

Software Credits

Lawbore™ makes use of some superb Open-Source software to work its magic, including: Smarty for templating, JQuery for UI effects, , nico3333fr Modals for pop-up windows and MixItUp CC for visual sorting effects.

Learnmore is built on MediaWiki.

TLDR is built on Contao CMS.

Future Lawyer blog is built with Wordpress CMS.

Fonts

Lawbore is set inKreon font by Julia Petretta and Poppins by Indian Type Foundry.