In the wake of the recent news that the Chicago office of the
world's largest law firm, Baker & McKenzie, had on March 31
dismissed its entire library staff, leaders of the American
Association of Law Libraries are taking action to demonstrate to
the nation's legal community that their profession is essential
to the cost-effective provision of information services in the
age of information technology.
AALL President Carol Billings, Louisiana's State Law Librarian,
and President-Elect Patrick M. Kehoe, Director of the American
University Law School Library, have announced the appointment of
a blue-ribbon "Task Force on the Value of Law Libraries in the
Information Age." Patricia Patterson, Director of Legal
Information Services at the Chicago firm of Schiff Hardin &
Waite, will chair the task force, whose additional members manage
the libraries of law firms in eight major cities from coast to
coast. The task force's primary purpose will be to compile and
explain data demonstrating the worth of library services supplied
by professionally-trained law librarians. Firms and institutions
that require legal information and consulting firms that they
hire to advise them will be able to use the data in making
management decisions.
"We deeply regret the unfortunate dismissal of our colleagues by
Baker & McKenzie," Billing and Kehoe stated in an announcement
released today. "They are highly-skilled professionals who were
dedicated to helping advance the firm's goals to serve a global
clientele. The Baker & McKenzie office's decision should not be
interpreted as the beginning of a trend toward the downsizing and
out-sourcing of law firm libraries." Task Force Chair Patricia
Patterson emphasizes the importance of a permanent, experienced
library staff possessing a thorough knowledge of the needs of
particular partners and sections in the firm. "A good law firm
library becomes the keeper of the firm's institutional memory,"
Patterson asserts. "We understand the firm's mission and
contribute to carrying it out."
AALL President Billings contends that law librarians are the
professionals in the legal community with most extensive
knowledge of information resources and the means to access them.
"Acquiring legal information is an expensive proposition -- not
something to be left to the uninitiated. Serious decisions need
to be made about which products to subscribe to in print format,
which in CD-ROM, and which to access on-line. Then too, it takes
a long time to develop expertise in the search strategies for all
the various products and services."
"The dynamic, volatile nature of the legal publishing industry
these days makes it very difficult to keep up with all the
companies and their products and business practices," cautions
President-Elect Kehoe. "The number of new publishers entering
the market is staggering, and you need a genealogy chart to
figure out who owns whom. A firm that thinks it can save money
by handing over the library to some other department in the firm
or to a novice without professional education or experience is
getting no bargain. Our task force is going to document our
claims for the firms so that they will have good data on which to
base their business decisions."
Besides Chair Patterson, other members of the task force are
Austin Doherty, Hogan & Hartson, Washington D.C.; Mark Estes,
Holme Roberts & Owen, Denver; June MacLeod, Gray Cary Ware &
Freidenrich, San Diego; Alice McKenzie, Brobeck, Phleger &
Harrison, San Francisco; Alvin Podboy, Baker & Hostetler,
Cleveland; Kay M. Todd, Paul Hastings Janofsky & Walker, Atlanta;
Geoffrey Trigger, Tenzer, Greenblatt, Fallon & Kaplan, New York;
and Victoria Trotta, Lewis & Roca, Phoenix.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 03/09/00 PST