Law Librarians Expand Into Tech and ILTA

Deborah Panella is Director of Library & Knowledge Services at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, and Information Management Track Team Coordinator for ILTA 2013.

The ILTA annual conference is now underway with a record number of attendees, a growing number of whom are from the law library community (including representatives from AALL). The International Legal Technology Association brings together law firm and corporate law department professionals from a wide variety of career tracks and disciplines, and members come from around the globe.

How to Sit at the Table: Lean In

by: Joan L. Axelroth, Axelroth and Associates, Library & Information Management Consultant

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the challenges facing law firm librarians, including the obstacles to success and what we can do to overcome them.  Always a worthwhile topic, it is of particular interest these days as I work alongside a stellar committee on programming for the upcoming Private Law Library Summit to be held this July as part of AALL’s annual meeting.  

The Value of Law Librarians Blogging on their Firm’s Blog

Cheryl Niemeier is Director of Library Services at Bose McKinney & Evans LLP  

Apparently, I am blazing a new trail as seemingly the first and only law librarian who is officially blogging on their firm’s blog page! “That’s huge!” said Greg Lambert of 3 Geeks and a Law Blog when he congratulated me on this new responsibility. The news also prompted Steve Lastres to ask me to write this guest blogger post describing the value proposition of law librarians blogging. 

The librarian is alive and keeping a finger on the pulse of our ever-changing world.

A law librarian’s experience of the 11^th SAOIM (SA Online Information Meeting) conference: Innovation in an age of limits, by Lydia Craemer

Tweeters and guest bloggers at the conference – Faith Zalekeli , Lydia Craemer, Danielle Botha and Carmen Davies.

Initially I was very unsure about whether I should attend SAOIM. Once the full programme was made available, I looked at it wondering “what can a law librarian and law libraries gain from this?” However, as I looked at the topics my own personal interest in the topics was piqued and I decided to attend. One of the invited speakers, Maggie Verster had been instrumental in getting me on to Twitter many years ago. I was limited to the number of days and workshops I could attend. Hence I decided from the start that I would follow the conference on Twitter on the days that I could not attend. The goal was to learn from what I was missing. I followed the #SAOIM tweets on 5 June and 7 June favouring quite a few tweets that “spoke” to me and retweeting some that I thought would be of benefit to my followers. (Read the #SAOIM Tweets by Lydia Craemer (@infointuitive) – 5-8 June 2012).

Networking in Neutral

Although written in the first person this post contains ideas from several members of the Scottish Law Librarians Group.

Social media is a hot topic in UK law firms at the moment with endless articles in the legal press. There are of course many ethical and risk issues and both the Law Society and the Law Society of Scotland have recently issued guidelines for lawyers.