The American Association of Law libraries, Annual Meeting & Conference brought several harbingers of good news on the job market for law librarians and knowledge management professionals.

I don’t need to remind anybody that the “death of the law librarian” has been repeatedly predicted over the past 20 years.  Many law firm administrators and legal tech writers mistakenly believed that as print libraries shrank and morphed into digital resources, there would be no need for information professionals. Of course, this prediction made no sense to me because law firms are in an information business and their clients’ interests live and die by the quality of the legal, business, trade, legislative and scientific information at their fingertips.  Law librarians’ information management skills were never tethered to print, and became even more important in a digital world which introduced new challenges related to information, quality, as well as the increasing volume, velocity and variability of unstructured data. Library and KM Directors upscaled their staffs and seized the opportunity to generate strategic business and legal insights through the integration of internal and external data.  Zach Warren, eTechnology & Innovation Insights, Thomson Reuters Institute, provided a fascinating overview of a recent Thomson Reuters Staffing Survey which reported a remarkable spike in the demand for library and KM professionals. Before I dive into that I want to highlight another surprising development

The CIA wants you!

I have been going to AALL meetings for about 40 years and I can’t ever remember a time when any employer set up a booth in the exhibit area of the conference in order to recruit law librarians.  Even more stunning was the nature of this employer – The Central Intelligence Agency! Now the CIA knows a lot about research and it is really a testament to the special skill set offered by librarians that they came to the Conference to track down the real experts. The recruiting literature states that the CIA has created its first new directorate in 50 years. The Directorate of Digital Innovation. The DDI is looking to fill its team with “forward thinking digitally savvy professionals…’shapers’ and ‘connectors’ who will lead, inspire and turn ideas into action.”

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