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your firm's library department as a hidden
gem of industry acumen: they share your
goals, they have technical prowess, and their
knowledge (dare I say) aligns closely with
that of your attorneys. This army of qualified,
capable innovators is already navigating
many of the same issues as ILTA's more
prominent membership sectors.
We are all facing pressure to do
more with less, and to do so with finesse,
while continuing to provide optimal client
service. We should not suppose that legal
research and legal technolo are two camps
talking about different issues—we should
be concerned that legal research and legal
technolo are two camps talking about
the same issues but not communicating
effectively with each other. Let's open the
gates.
Here are three reasons why you should
engage the library staff at your firm.
1 . Law library professionals are highly
skilled, specifically educated, and experienced
in interacting with your attorneys.
A primary reason to engage your
library team is its people. The 2017 AALL
Biennial Salary Survey reports that 9.3%
of professional librarians in law firms or
corporate law departments have a JD and
an advanced degree in information sciences,
and another 71.1% have one or the other. A
majority (53.2%) of this group have more than
15 years of experience. They know how to find
the information attorneys need to do their
jobs. Advanced business savvy, operational
expertise, strategic thinking and high quality
tools cannot replace the need for skilled legal
researchers. (Even analytics evangelists
assert that legal analytics cannot replace legal
research.) Librarians interact regularly with
attorneys and understand the preferences
of the ones in your organization. Like you,
they know how certain attorneys prefer their
deliverables and many are quite familiar with
the clients and industries served by your firm.
One specific application of knowledge
cross-pollination is competitive intelligence.
In a 2017 article, then-president of Bloomberg
Law, Scott Mozarsky, noted that firms "have
begun to recognize that they already have
… the core competencies necessary to be
successful with a more scientific approach
to winning business. However, these
competencies often don't sit in the marketing
or business development teams, but instead
are housed in their libraries." This is
significant, given that law firm leaders polled
in a 2019 Managing Partner Forum survey
(focused on small to mid-sized law firms)
ranked Marketing/Business Development as
the most important strategic priority—more
than improved productivity, technolo, or
associate development. Lawyers are looking
to drive business, and the underlying teams
are moving to data-driven approaches.
Further, the institutional knowledge
in your law library team shouldn't be
discounted, especially as it relates to change
management. Law librarians have been
champions of innovation and early adopters
of available technolo for a long time—
consider that you may have people working in
your library who have been present for nearly
every technological advancement in legal
since the advent of the personal computer.
Times have changed, yet their value remains.
2 . Legal research professionals grasp legal
content and context, making them ideal for
training, KM, and data-driven initiatives.
At the ILTACON 2019 Tuesday general
session, panelist Farrah Pepper, Chief Legal
Innovation Counsel at Marsh & McLennan,
noted that the legal industry is a guild of
knowledge workers. She explained that in
most guilds, incoming tradesmen learn by
way of apprenticeship. But in legal, brand
new associates learn on the job while billing.
Making significant changes to the practice
of law, then, creates a divide between the
experienced "tradesmen" passing along their
knowledge and the rising generation learning
a new way. That is disruptive in every sense
of the word. Legal research teams are critical
here. Who else at your firm is proficient in
traditional legal research methodologies and
the emerging tools used to locate and extract
information?
In a 1993 issue of Perspectives, Ellen
Callinan, now the Co-Director of Research
Services at Arnold & Porter, wrote,
"Lawyers and law students must perform
legal research to do their jobs. In the past,
lawyers acquired this skill on the job. The
cost of information and competition for
clients undermine this process and leave a
gap between the need to research effectively
and the availability of effective legal research
instruction. Nature abhors a vacuum, so
somehow, some way, someone will teach
legal research. We the law librarians are the
best candidates for that task." More than 25
years later, those words hold true. Wouldn't
we want, then, an organizational culture that
factors the legal library team into a forward-
looking firm strate?
To be efficient, firms need cooperative
support staff teams to provide holistic
competencies. Strate and financial
departments address the why behind making
changes to business practices, technolo
and innovation departments address the
how, and research teams provide insight
and expertise on much of the what. Unity
between these functions and departments
can only serve the attorneys well. Cheryl
Wilson Griffin underscored this concept by
reminding legal technologists that "having
an intimate understanding of how the most
tedious legal work is currently completed
is key to understanding the business value
of new technolo." Attorneys call on law
librarians to perform a range of tasks from
document retrieval to in-depth, multi-hour
billable research projects with client-
facing deliverables. In terms of technical
competencies, good librarians have depth
and breadth, having mastery of numerous
resources and knowing when to use each one.
Apart from the constant work law
librarians do to support active matters,
they can be tremendous resources for KM
initiatives and sources for metrics. Many
