AALL Annual Meeting 2019 Recap: Summit X: The Path to 2030

Kristen Perez and Janet McKinney received grants from the Private Law Librarians and Information Professionals Special Interest Section to attend the PLLIP Summit occurring on Saturday, July 13, before the AALL Annual Meeting. Below are their conference recaps.

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By Kristen Perez, Research Specialist at Nelson, Mullins, Riley & Scarborough in Charlotte, NC

Jordan Furlong of Law 21 started off the day by delivering the keynote address, “How Law Librarians and Legal Information Professionals Can Redefine Law Firms in the 21^st Century.”  Mr. Furlong took us on a tour of the climate change that has occurred in the legal industry in recent years and provided a map to the future and our changing roles.

Mr. Furlong outlined the factors at play in the legal industry that can provide opportunities for legal information professionals as we navigate these changes:

• Law firms have traditionally operated under the billable hour model, letting young associates ‘train on the job’ at the expense of clients.  This business model is being called into question by big law firm clients, many of whom have negotiated alternative fee arrangements.   Clients are increasingly unwilling to pay for research expenses and the training of new lawyers.
• Legal work is becoming divided into commodity-level versus complex tasks.  Alternative legal service providers have begun to assume work previously done by junior-level associates, leaving firms to handle tasks that involve more expertise.
• The technology of legal work has evolved, as artificial intelligence and analytics providers have emerged.
• Overall, client expectations are changing and are forcing law firms to adapt.  Alternative legal service providers are creating competition for law firms.  Clients demand value and want law firms to ‘know’ them and their industries, and to anticipate their needs.

This invites opportunity for we, as legal information professionals, to redefine our roles.  Our profession has not only embraced and promoted the use of technology in legal research, but has also kept pace with the various incarnations of legal research platforms.  We are neither unfamiliar with, nor adverse to, change.  As a service department, we are also accustomed to working with other departments within our organizations to achieve institutional goals.

Fastcase 50 Honorees Include Marlene Gebauer, Global Director of Strategic Legal Insights, Greenberg Traurig LLP

Marlene Gebauer, Global Director of Strategic Legal Insights at Greenberg Traurig LLP, has been named one of the Fastcase 50 honorees for 2019. Fastcase 50 recognizes lawyers, judges, legal technologists, librarians and others for their contributions to the legal field. Marlene is a PLLIP member and a co-host with Greg Lambert on the The Geek in Review podcast, which covers “the Legal Information profession with a slant toward technology and management, along with interviews of key players in legal information and technology.”

From the Fastcase 50:

Marlene is a visionary in the application of legal technology, and was one of the first to bring data analytics into the day-do-day functions of law firms. She applied analytics across the entire firm, not just in one practice group or the other. Through her work at Greenberg Traurig she has boldly reinvented the way her firm approaches practice by creating the firm’s Innovation Lab, which implements processes through gamification techniques. Marlene routinely shares her knowledge on the popular podcast “The Geek in Review”, which she hosts with fellow librarian and Fastcase 50 honoree Greg Lambert.

The Changing Role of Women in the Law Library Community

(photo credit: Maggie Soladay, ALM)

Monica Bay is editor-in-chief of Law Technology News and a member of the California bar. Email: mbay@alm.com. Twitter: @lawtechnews @LTNMonicaBay

I’ll be honest. One of the reasons I said “yes” to the invitation to speak at AALL’s 106th annual meeting was because it was in Seattle. Frankly, I probably would have said yes to speak in San Diego, Yakima, Fremont, Santa Barbara, Ashland, Vancouver, or Sequim — or any other town from the Mexican border to Barrow, Alaska — because I have learned in my 15 years as a San Francisco ex-pat living in New York City that it is a really good idea to leave hot, steamy, miserable Manhattan the last week of July.

After the Evolution: Promoting the Value of Law Librarians

Submitted: Emily R. Florio, Manager of Libraries & Library Information Systems, Fish & Richardson (florio@fr.com).

On Thursday April 25th, 2013 LLAGNY (Law Library Association of Greater New York), ILTA (International Legal Technology Association) and SLA (Special Libraries Association)’s New York chapter sponsored After the Evolution, an educational event and networking reception. This strategic initiative and program built upon the LLSDC (Law Librarians’ Society of Washington, D.C.) Showcase, a grassroots approach to communicating the value that law librarians bring to their firms, particularly lawyers, the “C” Suite and other firm administration. Several non-DC librarians from AALL’s Private Law Libraries Special Interest Section attended the DC event and helped bring it to NY with future plans for Boston, Chicago and hopefully beyond the East Coast. The objective of this ongoing project is to aggressively promote the management value of law librarians to the target community of law firm leaders. Participating librarians promoted their diverse management skills to administration, technology and marketing professionals rather than to our traditional audience of peers. This concept recognizes that library management is an insightful component of firm management strategy and that our contributions are vital to the overall operation and success of the firm.

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.