CHANGING JOBS: information professionals embrace commerce


Law firms have transformed the way they use legal librarians, with information professionals being used to gain intelligence on rival firms and gather key strategic information.



A report by publishers Sweet & Maxwell, released exclusively to the Gazette this week, showed that librarians have exchanged their traditional role of researching changes in the law in favour of supplying commercially focused information.



The research shows that 70% of senior information professionals now deliver market information and other commercially valuable benefits to their firms. Sweet & Maxwell's director of legal online, Alina Lourie, said: 'By providing information about which opportunities to target and which services to provide, legal librarians can help [firms] form a sophisticated strategy underpinned by close market scrutiny.'



Graham Holliday, information manager at City firm Clyde & Co, said: 'Here we have business development people dedicated to looking at what the competition is doing, for example, and we do money-laundering checks to make sure prospective clients are bona fide. Whether it's library, on-line databases, research or knowledge management, it is all geared to supporting the firm's business objectives.'



Loyita Worley, senior manager of Europe & Middle East library operations at US firm Reed Smith's London office, added that librarians often had to conduct 'drilled-down database searches on a specific market anywhere in the world.'



Sweet & Maxwell surveyed senior information managers in 50 commercial law practices, almost half of which were top 100 firms.



Jonathan Rayner