We buy the libraries the profession has outgrown.

SellLawBooks began because its founder, Adam Smith, kept seeing the same thing happen: solicitors retiring, chambers closing, offices moving — and perfectly good law libraries going straight into a skip, simply because nobody had a better option ready in time. That felt like a genuine waste, not just of money, but of decades of accumulated legal knowledge. The aim was simple from the start: keep legal texts in use rather than in landfill, wherever they end up next — and build that into an actual, easy option, rather than something that only happened by accident.

We've been doing that for seven years now, and collected more than 10,000 books from chambers, firms, and individual practitioners across the UK in the process.

What we do

SellLawBooks is a specialist resource for selling, valuing, and clearing law books and legal libraries — as well as a law book buyer operating across the UK. We buy English law libraries — Halsbury's Laws of England, the All England Law Reports, Chitty, Archbold, and the other reports and practitioner texts that fill a chambers or firm's shelves — direct from solicitors, barristers, chambers, and firms across the UK. Complete sets or partial ones, current editions or old.

We're specialists in law book removals specifically, which is a genuinely different thing from a general office or house-clearance firm. The distinction is simple but matters: a removals company charges you to take the library away. We pay you for it instead, and the collection itself is free either way.

Why it matters

Most of what used to justify a print law library is now available on Lexis+ or Westlaw. That's left a lot of genuinely well-made reference works — some of them decades in the making — taking up space they no longer earn. We think that's a shame twice over: once for the firm paying to store books nobody opens, and once for the books themselves, which are usually still worth something to somebody. Most of what we buy goes on to a second working life — a smaller practice building out its own library, a student, or overseas, where English precedent still carries real weight in common law jurisdictions. We've shipped over 1,000 books to firms in Nigeria alone.

How it works

You tell us what you have. We value it — usually within 24 hours — based on completeness, edition, and condition. If you accept, we arrange free collection anywhere in the UK or Ireland and pay however suits you: cash on collection, cheque, or bank transfer, arranged in as little as 30 minutes during working hours. No cost to you at any stage.