Selling Law Books: Accountancy, Insurance & Banking

Most of this site is written for chambers and firms. But a real share of what we buy comes from businesses that aren't law firms at all, and each has a specific reason for holding the material.

Accountancy and insolvency

This is the strongest overlap of the three. Insolvency practice in the UK is authorised through accountancy bodies as much as legal ones — ICAEW and ACCA both licence insolvency practitioners — and the work is inseparable from company and insolvency law. A practising insolvency team needs the same texts a commercial solicitor would.

Tax sits even closer to the overlap. Works like Simon's Taxes are, in practice, used far more by tax accountants than by generalist solicitors, and a corporate tax team's reference shelf often looks much like a law firm's. Several of the larger accountancy firms also now run their own legal service arms, holding libraries that are functionally identical to a solicitors' practice.

Insurance

Claims and legal teams at insurers work directly with civil and tort law — liability, personal injury, professional indemnity, coverage disputes. Clerk & Lindsell on Torts and the general law reports are as relevant to an insurer's legal department as to a firm defending the same claims. Where a claims department is consolidating offices or moving to digital-only research, we buy the resulting library on the same terms as anywhere else.

Banks and financial institutions

Banking has its own standard practitioner text — Paget's Law of Banking, first published in 1904 and still, in its publisher's own words, "the banking law bible." A bank's in-house legal department typically holds this alongside general contract and civil procedure texts, since banking law is fundamentally contract law with a specific regulatory layer on top. Older institutions with a long history in a single building are particularly likely to have a print library that's simply never been cleared.

In-house legal departments generally

The pattern above applies more broadly than these three sectors. Any general counsel's office at a company that isn't itself a law firm tends to hold the same kind of reference library as one that is — Chitty on Contracts, the White Book, and the general law reports show up wherever contracts get negotiated and disputes get litigated, regardless of what the business actually does. If that describes your organisation, the rest of this site — starting with what we buy — applies to you exactly as it would to a firm.

For public sector organisations specifically — courts, councils, and universities — we've written a separate guide, since the process there tends to involve different paperwork and timelines: selling a court, council or university law library.