Written by Christine Dulac.
Christine is a Research & Knowledge Analyst at Bernstein Shur Sawyer and Nelson in Portland, ME.
For twenty years I was an academic law librarian but in August of 2022 I moved to the law firm of Bernstein Shur Sawyer and Nelson in Portland, ME. I was excited about this new job and the challenges it presented. I am now a solo librarian working in Maine’s largest law firm. As the director at the University of Maine School of Law, I had a staff, albeit a small one! My work was focused on the administrative side of the job—strategic planning, collection development and purchasing resources, and developing and teaching research instruction for students, faculty. and staff. As the only person working in the firm’s library, I continue to do the administrative tasks listed above, as well as responding to all research requests whether they come from the attorneys, the paralegals, or firm administration. I am a part of the Business Development team so I also conduct business intelligence as well as competitive intelligence research. I wear a lot of hats at the firm! It has been a very long time since I was doing these activities and it has been fun to get back to these aspects of librarianship! I didn’t realize how much I missed them until I started doing them again. I was a bit rusty; I admit but my research skills came back quickly and the AALL Private Law Librarians and Information Professionals SIS has been immensely helpful in helping me in those situations when I had no idea where to begin my research.
With a year under my belt, I started to explore learning opportunities to better understand the prominent issues in the law firm environment and to develop my business and competitive intelligence research skills. I came across the ARK Law Firm Libraries Conference completely by accident; it was listed as a budget item by the former librarian in the previous year’s budget. I hadn’t heard of ARK so I did a quick google search and saw what they had done for the 2022 conference. I reached out to the organization to inquire about the 2023 conference. After reviewing the agenda, I registered and attended the conference in November.
I thoroughly enjoyed this conference. It was well organized and focused exclusively on law firm librarianship and the issues faced by those working in that environment. The panels discussed timely, relevant issues, presented by well-known, experienced law librarians with excellent subject matter knowledge.
Not surprisingly, there were three panels on the impact Artificial Intelligence will have on the practice of law and on law librarianship. The best of these was the first presentation, Fireside Chat: Thinking the Unthinkable-How will legal publishing thrive, decline or transform in a Generative AI Era? Jean O’Grady, responded to questions about how AI will impact legal publishing and law librarianship. We have all seen and read the stories about how AI will replace many in the legal profession, including law librarians. During this session, Jean was quick to remind the attendees that this isn’t the first time predictions of our demise at the hands of some new technology have happened. The same was said with the development of computers and the rise of the internet. Throughout the discussion, we were reminded that law librarians are excellent at adapting to change and developing the new skills needed to become leaders in times of change. The same would be true with the development of AI. Our skills as information professionals would allow us to lead the way in developing the best queries for AI interfaces. Our skills would allow us to lead the way in developing the consistent taxonomies needed to organize the huge amounts of data AI would be used to review and summarize. In essence, the audience was encouraged to not fear this new technology but lo learn all they could about it so as to be better to lead when called upon.
The conference also introduced me to ideas that energized me and wanted me to learn more about. It has been a long time since that happened at a conference I attended. One panel discussed how the librarians were using API (Application Programming Interface) to automate tasks such as client intelligence, judge and expert witness information or current awareness tasks. Much of this was new to me and I have a lot to learn but I have note to myself to learn more about API’s and see if they can help me in the work that I do at the firm.
This is only a recap of two of the panels. There was a discussion on the future of competitive intelligence in law firm librarianship that was very interesting and one on how to successfully transition from print to digital resources and even a panel moderated by a former colleague from Yale Law School on training in the law firm environment. These examples speak to the wide variety of programming presented at the two-day conference.
If I had one complaint about the conference, it would be this—that many of the presentations were by librarians from large national and international firms making me wonder whether some of the ideas discussed could be scaled down for smaller regional firms like Bernstein Shur. Despite this concern, I left New York feeling energized and ready to investigate some of the ideas discussed at the conference. I would highly recommend those new to law firm librarianship attend this conference.
On Firmer Ground 