<b>Meyerowitz on Marketing</b>The Law Library Meets Marketing and Technology Head On

When she remembers what it was like to be a law firm librarian in the past, Kathy Greco, who is now the head librarian of Long Island-based Rivkin Radler L.L.P, always thinks of “shifting parties.” As a section of the library that housed one or more of the regional reporters was about to overflow, the library staff would come to work on a Saturday, order pizza, move the books to a different area of the library and re-shelve them there. It could take 4 or 5 hours to finish the job, and it was physically grueling work, Greco recalls.

Librarians who have begun to work relatively recently in law firms probably never have participated in a “shifting party” or in any similar event. That's because the nature of the law firm library ' and thus the librarian's role ' has undergone revolutionary change over the years. There still are books, at least some books, in today's law firm libraries, but Internet connections and CD-ROMs often seem to be just as prevalent and, perhaps, are actually even more important.

The Traditional Role

Traditionally, law firm librarians responded to requests from the firm's lawyers for books or other print materials that the lawyers needed to be able to research or analyze questions of law. Librarians photocopied cases pursuant to instructions they received from lawyers. They used the print version of Shepard's to check citations. “It could take a half-hour to completely Shepardize a topic,” Greco says.

In addition to finding the right books or checking the law, librarians catalogued the materials the library purchased, filed the supplements and pocket parts that arrived in the mail, and placed the materials the lawyers left on the carrels back where they belonged so that other lawyers could find and use them. Simply maintaining the collection was a time-consuming part of a librarian's responsibility.

Ralph Monaco, the librarian and executive director of the New York Law Institute and a former in-house law librarian, remembers that “attorneys borrowed things and might be too busy to give them back, or they gave them to other lawyers to use and people forgot who had what.” Back then, he says, “if a lawyer took an index to a 15-volume treatise, it would make the treatise virtually unusable.” So librarians often had to try to track down items that were missing from the library. Summarizing the relatively mundane life of the law librarian of the past, Ed Poll, a California-based coach and consultant to law firms, says that they “would make sure they got the books that were needed, that they were up-to-date and that the Dewey Decimal system worked throughout the four corners of the library.”

The Changes

Law libraries were “huge” back then, Greco points out. They had to be, because they contained thousands and thousands of volumes. Now, though, law libraries are much smaller. “Our space is one-half the size it used to be,” Greco notes. The reason: technology. Law firm libraries currently “anchor around online sources,” Monaco declares. What was once a very physical environment is now in large part a “virtual” environment.

Lynn Leinartas, the research librarian in the Chicago office of Jenkens & Gilchrist, says “almost all law libraries are moving away from paper.” Many law firms no longer purchase every regional reporter. If a lawyer with a local practice in Pennsylvania does not have a hard copy of a decision included in a Southwestern Reporter, for example, the lawyer can go online and retrieve it from Lexis, Westlaw or another provider, and, Greco points out, “it may be cheaper than photocopying.” Indeed, many decisions are available on the Web for free from the courts themselves or at law school or other Web sites.

Law libraries also take up less real estate today than they used to because they now need fewer chairs and research stations. With computer access, e-mail, the phone and the Internet, lawyers do not need to go to the library as much as they did in the past. Some libraries are almost like ghost towns, according to Monaco of the New York Law Institute. And in some larger firms, if a librarian goes up to the office in an elevator with lawyers from the firm, the librarian might not recognize the lawyers and the lawyers might not recognize the librarian!

This is ironic in a way because today law firm librarians typically play a larger and more important role in the operation of a law firm than ever before.

Knowledge Management

Poll calls today's librarians the “gatekeepers of knowledge.” The biggest responsibility they have is “keeping up with the constantly changing information that is available through computerized services, filtering it and deciding the most cost-effective way to do research,” Rivkin Radler's Greco states. Indeed, there is so much information available today, that Leinartas sees a major part of her responsibility as “dealing with information overload.”

Librarians fulfill this gatekeeper responsibility in a variety of ways. For one thing, librarians provide training to lawyers about the information that is so readily available to them on the Web and otherwise. This training, Greco says, is intended to help lawyers “decipher what's useable, good, accurate and current information.”

Secondly, librarians actually take charge of the information themselves, finding it, analyzing its quality, massaging its form and presenting it in a manner and format that is useful for lawyers. “There are so many alerts and case watches that attorneys can be put on,” Leinartas says, “that nobody looks at anything.” Being unaware of a major development about a client can be embarrassing for a lawyer, so Leinartas says she tries to put relevant information into a headline style or some other understandable and readable design when disseminating it to the lawyers in her firm.

Librarians are also doing more and more research themselves nowadays. Poll states that “today, librarians are active participants in the development of information before an engagement and during the ongoing representation itself.” Leinartas, for instance, does a great deal of “business” research at her firm, finding background information on clients on everything from their stockholders to their federal securities filings and from the business issues they face to the lawsuits in which they are involved. She also partners with Rose Fauster, the firm's marketing manager, on the firm's client-development efforts. Toward that end, Leinartas prepares overviews of companies that the firm is targeting as prospective clients. She also obtains information about companies that will be sending people to firm seminars so that the firm's lawyers are better able to focus their talks. Additionally, Leinartas supervises requests to clipping services and even researches and identifies associations for lawyers to join that might provide the most useful contacts and, hence, the best new clients.

One key service that law librarians are providing more and more often is evaluating information that is available to lawyers. “Librarians used to review print materials to be able to make recommendations as to which items to purchase,” Monaco says. “Now, they evaluate Web sites to put on a firm's intranet.” As he describes it, “Librarians are Web managers; they are managers of a virtual library.”

Growing Roles

For quite some time the wisest firms tried to develop “brief banks” so that they did not have to reinvent the wheel when they were writing a new brief or memorandum of law on a topic that they had previously researched. Today librarians are playing an important role in helping to organize their firm's work product and to make it more easily accessible. The “brief bank” has expanded, and it seems quite right for the librarian to be in charge.

In some firms librarians also are in charge of the firm's records and files, which some see as a natural progression for a person with traditional library skills. In other law firms librarians have taken over the continuing legal education program, an extension of the information training they provide.

How do librarians keep up-to-date themselves in an information-laden world? Leinartas points to a professional association of librarians in her city, where she attends regular meetings and continuing education courses with her colleagues, reviews trade journals and engages in old-fashioned networking.

Some librarians now have client contact. Some bill their time. And some have to be able to calculate a “return on investment” or “return on assets” or otherwise justify their positions and their budgets to firm management. The times have changed and the librarians' roles have exponentially expanded, but the day is still only 24 hours long. It may be that only law librarians ' inherently organized, dedicated and hardworking ' could handle such a growth in their professional functions so well.

When she remembers what it was like to be a law firm librarian in the past, Kathy Greco, who is now the head librarian of Long Island-based Rivkin Radler L.L.P, always thinks of “shifting parties.” As a section of the library that housed one or more of the regional reporters was about to overflow, the library staff would come to work on a Saturday, order pizza, move the books to a different area of the library and re-shelve them there. It could take 4 or 5 hours to finish the job, and it was physically grueling work, Greco recalls.

Librarians who have begun to work relatively recently in law firms probably never have participated in a “shifting party” or in any similar event. That's because the nature of the law firm library ' and thus the librarian's role ' has undergone revolutionary change over the years. There still are books, at least some books, in today's law firm libraries, but Internet connections and CD-ROMs often seem to be just as prevalent and, perhaps, are actually even more important.

The Traditional Role

Traditionally, law firm librarians responded to requests from the firm's lawyers for books or other print materials that the lawyers needed to be able to research or analyze questions of law. Librarians photocopied cases pursuant to instructions they received from lawyers. They used the print version of Shepard's to check citations. “It could take a half-hour to completely Shepardize a topic,” Greco says.

In addition to finding the right books or checking the law, librarians catalogued the materials the library purchased, filed the supplements and pocket parts that arrived in the mail, and placed the materials the lawyers left on the carrels back where they belonged so that other lawyers could find and use them. Simply maintaining the collection was a time-consuming part of a librarian's responsibility.

Ralph Monaco, the librarian and executive director of the New York Law Institute and a former in-house law librarian, remembers that “attorneys borrowed things and might be too busy to give them back, or they gave them to other lawyers to use and people forgot who had what.” Back then, he says, “if a lawyer took an index to a 15-volume treatise, it would make the treatise virtually unusable.” So librarians often had to try to track down items that were missing from the library. Summarizing the relatively mundane life of the law librarian of the past, Ed Poll, a California-based coach and consultant to law firms, says that they “would make sure they got the books that were needed, that they were up-to-date and that the Dewey Decimal system worked throughout the four corners of the library.”

The Changes

Law libraries were “huge” back then, Greco points out. They had to be, because they contained thousands and thousands of volumes. Now, though, law libraries are much smaller. “Our space is one-half the size it used to be,” Greco notes. The reason: technology. Law firm libraries currently “anchor around online sources,” Monaco declares. What was once a very physical environment is now in large part a “virtual” environment.

Lynn Leinartas, the research librarian in the Chicago office of Jenkens & Gilchrist, says “almost all law libraries are moving away from paper.” Many law firms no longer purchase every regional reporter. If a lawyer with a local practice in Pennsylvania does not have a hard copy of a decision included in a Southwestern Reporter, for example, the lawyer can go online and retrieve it from Lexis, Westlaw or another provider, and, Greco points out, “it may be cheaper than photocopying.” Indeed, many decisions are available on the Web for free from the courts themselves or at law school or other Web sites.

Law libraries also take up less real estate today than they used to because they now need fewer chairs and research stations. With computer access, e-mail, the phone and the Internet, lawyers do not need to go to the library as much as they did in the past. Some libraries are almost like ghost towns, according to Monaco of the New York Law Institute. And in some larger firms, if a librarian goes up to the office in an elevator with lawyers from the firm, the librarian might not recognize the lawyers and the lawyers might not recognize the librarian!

This is ironic in a way because today law firm librarians typically play a larger and more important role in the operation of a law firm than ever before.

Knowledge Management

Poll calls today's librarians the “gatekeepers of knowledge.” The biggest responsibility they have is “keeping up with the constantly changing information that is available through computerized services, filtering it and deciding the most cost-effective way to do research,” Rivkin Radler's Greco states. Indeed, there is so much information available today, that Leinartas sees a major part of her responsibility as “dealing with information overload.”

Librarians fulfill this gatekeeper responsibility in a variety of ways. For one thing, librarians provide training to lawyers about the information that is so readily available to them on the Web and otherwise. This training, Greco says, is intended to help lawyers “decipher what's useable, good, accurate and current information.”

Secondly, librarians actually take charge of the information themselves, finding it, analyzing its quality, massaging its form and presenting it in a manner and format that is useful for lawyers. “There are so many alerts and case watches that attorneys can be put on,” Leinartas says, “that nobody looks at anything.” Being unaware of a major development about a client can be embarrassing for a lawyer, so Leinartas says she tries to put relevant information into a headline style or some other understandable and readable design when disseminating it to the lawyers in her firm.

Librarians are also doing more and more research themselves nowadays. Poll states that “today, librarians are active participants in the development of information before an engagement and during the ongoing representation itself.” Leinartas, for instance, does a great deal of “business” research at her firm, finding background information on clients on everything from their stockholders to their federal securities filings and from the business issues they face to the lawsuits in which they are involved. She also partners with Rose Fauster, the firm's marketing manager, on the firm's client-development efforts. Toward that end, Leinartas prepares overviews of companies that the firm is targeting as prospective clients. She also obtains information about companies that will be sending people to firm seminars so that the firm's lawyers are better able to focus their talks. Additionally, Leinartas supervises requests to clipping services and even researches and identifies associations for lawyers to join that might provide the most useful contacts and, hence, the best new clients.

One key service that law librarians are providing more and more often is evaluating information that is available to lawyers. “Librarians used to review print materials to be able to make recommendations as to which items to purchase,” Monaco says. “Now, they evaluate Web sites to put on a firm's intranet.” As he describes it, “Librarians are Web managers; they are managers of a virtual library.”

Growing Roles

For quite some time the wisest firms tried to develop “brief banks” so that they did not have to reinvent the wheel when they were writing a new brief or memorandum of law on a topic that they had previously researched. Today librarians are playing an important role in helping to organize their firm's work product and to make it more easily accessible. The “brief bank” has expanded, and it seems quite right for the librarian to be in charge.

In some firms librarians also are in charge of the firm's records and files, which some see as a natural progression for a person with traditional library skills. In other law firms librarians have taken over the continuing legal education program, an extension of the information training they provide.

How do librarians keep up-to-date themselves in an information-laden world? Leinartas points to a professional association of librarians in her city, where she attends regular meetings and continuing education courses with her colleagues, reviews trade journals and engages in old-fashioned networking.

Some librarians now have client contact. Some bill their time. And some have to be able to calculate a “return on investment” or “return on assets” or otherwise justify their positions and their budgets to firm management. The times have changed and the librarians' roles have exponentially expanded, but the day is still only 24 hours long. It may be that only law librarians ' inherently organized, dedicated and hardworking ' could handle such a growth in their professional functions so well.