Law Firm Economics and Librarians - Add Value Through Training

Add value. That was one message that came through loud and clear today in the Webinar, "Succeed in the New Law Firm Library Reality -- Learn the Business Side of the Firm," hosted by the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and the informal group of law library managers of the Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C. (LLSDC).
 The presentation was part of a series of planned programs from PLL SIS law firm librarians, Change as Opportunity, organized by a Blue Ribbon Committee of some of PLLs most innovative and experienced law librarians.

The format was an informal series of questions from a panel of three private law library mangers (Scott Bailey of Squire Sanders, Kate Martin of McKenna Long and Carolyn Ahearn of Wiley Rein) and answers from Barry Strauss, the administrator at Wiley Rein. I found it heartening that Strauss, well known and respected among law firm administrators, thinks that one of the best ways for librarians to add value at a firm is through training, and that this issue came up several times in the discussion.

The economic downturn is, of course, wreaking havoc on law firms. Layoffs have been widespread and budgets have been cut to the bone. But Strauss says the need to do more with less isn’t letting up. If anything, next year things will be tougher because further cuts will be needed, and we all feel as if there’s no where deeper for us to go.

Training To the Bottom Line
Along with staffing, always among the most massive items in the budget, other major expenses, like online research spending, have definitely become targets. Attorneys need information to do their jobs, but librarians, Strauss says, need to ask the hard questions and always keep costs in mind. In that kind of environment, how is training attorneys going to help?

Strauss gets it:
• Training makes users more efficient and more cost effective. They can do more work for more clients with more relevant results in the same amount of time. Increased productivity is the name of the game.
• Training limits total use of online services to keep costs down, and that has an impact on future contract negotiations.
• Training brings costs down for clients where they are passed along (much less common these days – often clients won't and sometimes can't pay).

From his comments, Strauss sees this as a way for librarians to add value too. He talked about how this is an issue were librarians can "take ownership," not that we haven't been, but his point is that it our ownership needs to be more visible and more measurable.

• Show how the time you spend training is reflected in reduced usage and cost saving.
• Talk to your attorneys about the work product they are getting from your trainees. Is it better? If not, find out why not and work on changing your program to improve it.
• Survey your users to see what’s working and what isn’t. Elicit feedback and, where appropriate, highlight success to your higher ups.
• If you aren’t already doing a self review or some kind or annual report on your activities to promote your library, you ought to be.

Encouraging Attendance
Great, but has he ever tried to get an associate, much less a partner to come to training? One attendee on site asked, “Aside from offering food, how do we get people to attend training?” Strauss jokingly noted that Wiley doesn’t offer food for most meetings at all anymore – budget cuts – and that it was pretty striking how poorly attended a department meeting is now compared to the 60 or so people who might have attended when there was a free lunch.

He gets this too, though, and offered excellent advice: Training attendance isn’t something you can expect. You can’t just post an announcement and invite people and expect that they will attend. Associates and partners have billable requirements that will always be their priority unless you can show them how that time spent training with net them a benefit in the bottom line.

In this case, you need to start at the top. Talk to the Director, the Administrator, the Managing Partner, the department head – whoever is most likely to see your point and, as we used to say at Fried Frank, “Strongly Encourage” attendance. Go prepared to make the case for the benefit of training to them. It’s money in their pocket if the associates are better trained, more cost effective and more efficient. Librarians don’t necessary relish this kind of persuasive contact with the higher ups, but it needs to be done, and no one else is going to do it for you.

Special Training Challenges
Ok, so what if you’ve got the top down approach working and your senior folk are strongly encouraging their juniors to attend training. What about the senior attorneys? To paraphrase one attendee, given the greater difficulty of cost recovery, partners need to either get their skills up or NOT do their own training. But they don’t want to go to training and they don’t want someone else to do that work.

Strauss encourages a different approach: Take training to the partners. As he points out, this is not just a library issue, it happens when they get a new phone system or other new technology too. Go to their offices. Some people will not participate in training even if you bring it to them, but take the initiative, and go to them when you can. He suggests we take them an example of where they have been inefficient and say, “I can help you with this.” I think it’s hard to expect a librarian to show a partner where he or she has erred as a user, but maybe it would work to start by saying, “I think there are some ways we can change your research patterns to make them more cost effective.”

Strauss also suggested that attorneys want to do their own research so they can continue to learn to be better lawyers, even if they are inefficient. They may not be willing to not do their own research. He suggests that librarians work to make skilled researchers (whether they are library staff, legal assistants, or attorneys) more visible - market their expertise, emphasize their lower billing rate, promote their cost effectiveness.

It's Not All about Cost
Last, Strauss noted that the return on investment librarians can show, the value we can offer, is not all about costs. It is also about client service. How have new associates responded to training? How are they handling research? Legal Assistants? Are they more cost effective and efficient because of the time you have spent with them? Has the quality of their research improved? That is worth assessing and communicating.

Strauss addressed much more in this session than just the training-related issues I have paraphrased above. A recording of the session will be posted soon on the AALL Website, so I encourage you to listen when it becomes available. I will share the link here as well, though I anticipate it will only be available to members.

What are your thoughts on training and how it can highlight the value of the library? Have you had those frank discussions with The Powers That Be at your firm? Please comment and share your experiences.

Welcome to Teaching Legal

Hello, blawgdom, and welcome to Teaching Legal. Remember me? I am that law library training, technology and marketing enthusiast who used to write for LLRX back in the day (that would be BC, before children), Cindy Carlson. Even before that I was the training, technology and marketing enthusiast, Cindy Curling. The kids are a little more independent these days, and I am happy to be getting back to keeping up with and writing about some of my favorite topics again.

When I started designing a library training program for a law firm in DC, back in that day, I didn't have many models to draw on, so I organized a community within my library association to discuss training topics and share ideas. We haven't been active lately, but progess is slowly being made to change that.

My philosophy has always been not to reinvent the wheel where it wasn't necessary, and that the efforts of a group of like-minded people is bound to result in more useful ideas than I could ever come up with on my own. I'd like to see that idea carry over into this space as well.

I'm still involved in training, though now I work for a legal publisher, and I mostly train other librarians (rather than attorneys) so they can best take advantage of what my company offers and ensure that their voices are heard within my company. Those who know me well know that I still have one foot firmly in the librarian camp, and I think that makes me better at what I do. I am not directly involved in sales, and I feel that part of being able to do my job well is to stay aware of what else is going on in legal research information, technology and training. My plan for this blog is not for it to be a company blog, or limited only to discussions of specific products, but a space where law librarians can generate conversations about how people are approaching training overall, what resources they recommend, trends they see, and futures they envision.

I hope you'll join the conversation.