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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.”

Read full article on Legal Tech HubContinue Reading GAI Driving a Hot Job Market for Library and KM Professionals

On July 6th Wolters Kluwer and Above the Law released a survey Generative AI in the Law: Where Could This All Be Headed? The survey queried lawyers and other business professionals in the legal industry to assess the expected impact of Generative AI on the Legal Profession. It seems that every day there is a survey or a webinar offering to answer the big question – can AI replace lawyers and other allied legal business professionals? It is a kind of anticipatory l marketing – lets just plant a flag on “Planet AI.”

The long term impact of Generative AI may well be profound, but today there is no consensus on how soon or how dramatically it will impact the practice of law. The survey respondents suggests a pessimistic future for law librarians and knowledge professionals. I have heard it all before. For the past 20 years the end of law librarians was immanent and yet for those 20 years we have been at the forefront of introducing new technologies that eliminated some traditional work and made room for us to climb the value ladder…. analytics, insights, APIs….New roles in support of Generative AI testing are already obvious.

Librarians Invented Prompt Engineering One of the key challenges to using Generative AI is learning how to construct the right query to generate the best result. Well law libraries are already “prompt” experts. Their skills reach back to the early days of “dot command” platforms that practically required a programming language to extract research results. Prompt Engineering sounds a lot less demanding than the technologies we mastered in the past.

The Chief Query Officer In 2013, I predicted the rise of a role I called “The Chief Query Officer” writing that “In a Big Data world, advantage will be  gained by asking better questions….In a Big Data world, every firm will be striving to be one question ahead of the competition……..And it will need to be the right question!” Librarians have mastered the “art of the Query.”.. step aside…

Key Findings of The Wolters Kluwer ATL Survey:

Continue Reading Another AI Survey– Another Cliché about the End of Librarians — But I See the Rise of The Chief Query Officer!

Ellyssa Kroski, the Director of Information Technology at the New York Law Institute  assembled a group of law library and technology thought leaders to contribute to her new book “Law Librarianship in the Age of AI” which was released last week by the American Library Association.

I was honored to have the opportunity to…

I recently authored the following article which appeared in the October issue of Thomson Reuter’s Practice Innovations.

Knowing Value: The Rise of the Law Firm Chief Knowledge Officer

This past July the American Lawyer published its first rebranded annual Survey of Law Firm Knowledge Management, Library, and Research Professionals and focused on the rise of…

The recent AALL Annual Conference in Austin was “hands down,”  the most exciting AALL Program I have ever attended. The programs were great – it was often hard to decide which panel to attend. I found my own panels  (Moneyball Analytics and Hits and Misses in New Products) up against programs that I hated to miss (the Innovation Tournament and an “all star”  CEO panel ( Fastcase – Walters, Casetext – Heller, Ross – Aruda,  Ravel – Lewis ) on AI and analytics prodded and provoked  by moderator Prof, Susan Nevelow Mart.

Legal Bloggers O’Keefe and Ambrogi Join Me in The AALL Exhibit Hall

Legal Tech thought leaders Bob Ambrogi and Kevin O’Keefe were a familiar sight at the panets, events, exhibits (and the nightly Fastcase after party). Earlier this week Ambrogi lauded AALL as one of the best conferences for those interested in legal tech. Is the market finally getting what information professionals have known all along? The legal profession requires content experts to navigate the burgeoning market of AI and analytics offerings. AALL: The Other Legal Tech Conference

The Second Oldest Legal Profession I spent time in the exhibit hall with Lexblog’s Kevin O’Keefe who commented on  the quality and variety of  panels and programs at the conference.

O’Keefe was surprised to learn that AALL had been around since 1906. In fact, in the legal community,  only the American Bar Association has an earlier founding …1878. AALL predates every other law related association by decades. It was 65 years before the Association of Legal Administrators was founded in 1971, 74 years before ILTA was founded in 1980, 79 years before the Legal Marketing Association was founded in 1985.

O’Keefe also commented on the importance of information professionals by comparison to other law firm administrative functions. “Lawyers could still practice law without technology, or marketing or administrative help, but legal information always was and remains core to the practice of law.”

O’Keefe has a point which goes beyond the core practice of law. Law firms have become complex, regional, national and multi-national organizations. Business intelligence and legal knowledge has never been more critical to the current high stakes competitive market, no one else in the firm is better qualified to assess the potential value of research products offering AI and analytics… and yet…information professionals occupy relatively few seats in the legal C-Suite compared to the technologists and marketing professionals. The person who understand the quality of information should be at the table and not down the organization chart out of ear shot.

But this may be about to change…
Continue Reading The Second Oldest Legal Profession: Law Librarians: The Analytics and Algorithms of Change in the Legal C-Suite

Last year I pleaded with ALM to change the name of their annual Library survey since they had been predicting the end of Library’s for about 14 years. It was time to stipulate that print collections are shrinking and move on to exploring the dynamic organizations which have emerged in their place.

This year The American Lawyer has finally renamed the annual survey as the Survey of Law Firm Management Library and Research Professionals. The accompanying articles have shifted gear as well. The articles are titled “Law Librarian? Trying Chief Knowledge Officer” by Mary Ellen Egan and ‘From Providing Data to Providing Insight.” by Lizzy McLellanContinue Reading American Lawyer Highlights Rise of The CKO in 2017 Survey of Library, Knowledge Management and Research Professionals

Yes Libraries are Shrinking Now What?

Two weeks ago American Lawyer Media released it’s 2016 library survey with the unfortunate headline “Downsizing continues at  law firm libraries.”  The headline is problematic for two reasons: 1. Shrinking libraries are old news and 2. Information professionals are driving some of the most important new technologies into the practice of law….

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The American Association of Law Libraries Board (and myself by proxy) received a harsh rebuke from the AALL membership when the rebranding vote results were announced today.   I wasn’t surprised that  the name  “Association for Legal Information” was rejected. I was stunned that it was  voted down by a  huge majority. I expected a close

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