D. Managing a Small Law Firm Law Library

• Author: Ted Tjaden
• Profession: National Director of Knowledge Management McMillan LLP
• Pages: 293-294

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Legal researchers are often involved in the organization or running of a law firm’s law library. For larger firms, a decision may be made to hire a part-time or full-time law librarian. As a rough rule of thumb, firms of thirty-five to forty-five lawyers can usually justify the need for a full-time librarian to manage their in-house law library. Larger firms will often have a team of librarians and other library technicians managing their collection. Smaller firms will often make do with a part-time librarian or will simply have some other person within the organization manage the library collection.

There are several things to consider about managing a small law firm law library:

· Hiring a law librarian: In Canada, a librarian is usually someone with a two-year Master’s degree from a university library school program that is accredited by the American Library Association. The training would include a number of things, including how to catalogue and classify information, how to manage a library, how to provide reference and research services, and how to create and update web pages. In some cases, courses specifically on law librarianship are offered. To place an advertisement to hire a law librarian in Canada, there is the Jobs website at the Faculty of Information Studies³and the Job-line of the Foothills Library Association (emphasizing positions in Western Canada).⁴When advertising for a law librarian it is critical to be fairly specific in the technical skills that are expected (such as online searching, cataloguing, and Internet authoring).

· Maintenance: Regardless of who is hired to manage a law firm’s library, there are a large number of things that the person must manage and maintain, including the selection and acquisition of material, cataloguing and labelling of material, shelving of material, weeding of material, and selective dissemination of information (informing

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users about new material relevant to their research needs). The larger the law library, the greater the need to devote resources to the maintenance of the collection.

· Research and reference support: Another important aspect of managing a law firm law library is to set up procedures for providing research and reference support. Will the firm have a "stand-alone" research lawyer to conduct legal research or will the work instead fall to articling students or other (typically junior) lawyers in the firm? What will the relationship be between...