Is our legal heritage at risk? What might be done to rescue private sector legal records

Private sector legal records are at risk of becoming lost or inaccessible through globalization, digital obsolescence, physical neglect, lack of interest on the part of information owners or reduced archive resources to preserve and provide access to the records. All records in the private sector face similar challenges, but modern legal records (early twentieth century to the present day) are particularly vulnerable due to recent developments which are transforming the nature, organisation, regulation and economics of legal services. These changes are outstripping the capacity of the traditional providers of legal research facilities to make relevant records available to researchers. Additionally, unless systematic efforts are made towards collecting private sector legal records, research using modern legal records will continue to be weighted towards the study of the legislation and the courts, producing a lopsided historical picture of the UK’s legal framework. In this article the authors explain concerns about the potential loss of legal records from the private legal sector and outline the ways in which the Legal Records at Risk research project at the IALS aims to investigate the issues and help identify possible solutions.