Introduction
This article reports the results of a case study that took place within a medium-sized London law firm, over a nine-month period in 2008. Its aim was to research and evaluate how building close and enduring relationships between the library and the organisation in which it operates can contribute to the ongoing improvement of library and information services within the firm. What follows is a slimmed down version of the final report, but I hope it will still make useful and interesting reading.
The original report was organised into several parts:
• The literature review, which helped to provide a rationale for the case study and put it in context
• An assessment of the existing service at the firm
• An explanation of the methods used by the library manager to build relationships within the firm
• An assessment of how successful the strategy was after nine months. This involved conducting an interview-based survey among users and potential users in November 2008 and comparing the results with those of an earlier survey from 2005, and also conducting a detailed evaluation of usage statistics for library services such as current awareness, training and research from November 2007 to November 2008.
The overall aim of the library manager was to improve and develop the firm's traditional library service towards a more comprehensive and proactive information service. It was hoped that by working more closely with the lawyers and other, non-legal, support teams such as marketing it would be possible to gain a better understanding of the work they and their clients do and to then create a service that better supports their needs, and which changes as their needs change. This is a challenge that many of us in the profession face, as supported by the literature search undertaken as research for the case study.
The rationale for the study, and what the current literature tells us about the importance of building relationships
The Handbook of Information Management, Maher (Reference Maher and Scammell2001, p.309), makes the point that users and their needs are subject to change. Maher compared a law firm library in the mid-1980s, which catered only for fee-earners (lawyers), to law libraries in 2001, which also provided services to non-lawyers such as business development experts, human resources and in some cases, external clients. Each group has a different information need to which the library service must adapt. Lawyers themselves have changing information needs as their own roles are changing in today's more competitive business climate. Many find they are expected to be a business adviser to their clients, not just a pure lawyer (Kumar, Reference Kumar2007). Keeping up to date with these changing needs is necessary if library and information services are to remain useful and relevant to their users. Books on information and library management tend to deal with this challenge in chapters dedicated to information needs assessments and marketing. Sykes (Reference Sykes and Within Scammell2001, p.111) discusses the role of the information needs assessment in obtaining “current, reliable indications of the types of information required”, yet the methods described, e.g. surveys, focus groups, are one-off or irregular events for many information professionals. Bell (Reference Bell and Scammell2001, p.353) describes how effective promotion and marketing plans can open lines of communication with the rest of the organisation and help deliver the services people actually want, but yet again, the methods discussed for collecting information on those wants include traditional methods such as interviews and questionnaires. Perhaps Bell's best advice comes under the subject of promotion, where she advises that being proactive, not reactive, and building relationships with colleagues is the best way to promote the service. Bell says that although information workers are not good at networking, attending their host organisation's events and meetings is a good way to become aware of the issues which affect that organisation. Maher (Reference Maher and Scammell2001, p.308) advocates using financial planning for profile raising and as a communication tool, thus showing the library as proactive and dynamic by regularly reviewing the current budget and planning the next budget in light of the firm's changing developments and priorities.
Recent literature seems to be placing more emphasis on Bell's approach, which encourages information professionals to get out of the library, get to know their users and forge lasting relationships. This will help give them the information they need to develop services in line with changing user needs. A paper presented to the 36th BIALL (British & Irish Association of Law Librarians) Conference by Bryant (Reference Bryant2006) urges law libraries not to operate in isolation from their wider organisations and gave examples of how one firm's library developed useful services by building relationships with their IT and business development teams.
The literature in the area of building relationships to inform and improve services is, to date, mostly advisory, with practical examples concentrating on discrete areas of the service.
Lamond (Reference Lamond2007) describes her experience, in a large law firm, of working closely with support teams, namely business development and marketing. A situation she believes is unique. She credits this close relationship with expanding her team's skill-set and ensuring they make a proactive contribution to their firm.
Humphries (Reference Humphries2006) takes the approach that relationship building is vital in enabling information professionals to implement their vision and make the changes they think necessary to develop the service. For this they need to have influence within an organisation. To gain this influence they need to “build trusting relationships and inspire and motivate others”.
Pearson (Reference Pearson2007), in discussing the creation of a knowledge management programme at a law firm, states that the ability to build relationships within the firm is a pre-requisite for success in this area. It increases understanding of user needs and lawyer buy-in to new ideas, and increases knowledge sharing.
One example was found where a firm has taken a wider approach. Eversheds is the largest law firm in the UK, with offices across the globe. It has the resources to maintain a team of programme managers who are dedicated to service and product development. To do this they must build and maintain close relationships with lawyers, practice lawyers, learning and development advisors, IT and business development teams, (Buxton and Johnson, Reference Buxton and Johnson2005). Johnson (Reference Johnson2005) further credits building relationships with colleagues as being a major factor in the success and ongoing development of the firm's training programme, but mentions also the huge investment of time involved in this approach. Johnson (Reference Johnson2004) elaborated on the firm's unique approach at the 2004 BIALL Conference, though, at that time the project was in its infancy. She envisioned a future where more libraries developed what she termed “client relationship management (CRM) initiatives, aimed at getting closer to their customers to understand their evolving needs and to ensure services and products always meet customer requirements and demands.” Johnson (Reference Johnson2004) understands that CRM forms a hugely important part of today's law firm management strategies and to her it seems logical for their libraries and information departments to adopt a similar approach. She also alluded to the previous year's address at BIALL where, she recalled, the speaker had said that the legal information profession did not generally understand the business it operated within the firm and needed to work in co-operation, not competition, with others, as well as getting closer to customers to develop more focused services.
Kumar (Reference Kumar2007) writes about the challenges for lawyers in maintaining CRM initiatives in law firms. He recommends several CRM techniques for maintaining, developing and attracting clients. These can equally be applied by information professionals and the key ingredient is determination to succeed. Kumar's recommendations can be paraphrased as:
• Ask clients the right questions and create the appropriate opportunities for the client to use the service again and again
• Listen to client feedback
• Provide the best possible advice with a framework of all-round support and service to clients
• Dare to get off your seats and enter the client's world
• Take a genuine interest in the client's industry, business and personal needs and strategic direction
• Remember that CRM is not a lunch appointment – it is a state of mind and should form part of the basic service you give your client.
(Kumar Reference Kumar2007)
Although the article referred to above, (Johnson, Reference Johnson2004), mentioned how successful the CRM approach had been for Eversheds, it did not produce any concrete evidence to show how, possibly because the project was still in the early stages. It seems clear that such a proactive approach is also a time-consuming one. It would be useful to see firstly, whether it is possible to apply it to a much smaller firm with fewer resources in staff and time, and secondly, to measure what effect the attempt to build closer relationships would have on the service and users. This was the rationale for the case study.
The Case Study
Setting the scene: a snapshot of the law firm in 2008
The law firm is small to medium-sized. It employs c.90 legal advisersFootnote 1, of which 38 are partners. There are approximately 100 non-legal staff. There are nine distinct legal departments, and various support departments, such as the library, human resources (HR), marketing and facilities. The firm has a main library, plus satellite libraries for each of the legal departments. Each department has a library representative, who is a lawyer, acting as the Library's main contact with their department. The firm employs two library staff, a library manager and a librarian. The manager's position was newly created, indicating the importance the firm was placing on developing an information service which could support the growing information needs of the firm. The library manager was recruited in February 2008 and reports directly to the library partner, who is a qualified lawyer with partnership status within the firm.
Review of the library service prior to the appointment of a library manager in February 2008
In 2005 the library partner undertook a survey to gather opinion on the library service. Approximately 73% of the lawyers responded. The main issues raised by the survey were as follows:
• Standard of hard copy resources
There was a perception that the collection was not up-to-date, loose-leaf works in particular. Texts were hard to locate and there was no complete and up-to-date catalogue.
• Availability of, and demand for, electronic resources
The majority of research was performed using hard copy sources. Most lawyers wanted training on the CDs and other limited online resources available to them and wanted more resources to be available via their desktops. This raised issues of cost and training. The library partner saw training on electronic resources as being the responsibility of the library, but this was not a service that had been offered. It was felt that the library needed to be more proactive in ascertaining demand and costs for online resources and making them more widely available.
• Current awareness services
The library produced a very limited number of current awareness services. The updates were read regularly by relatively few people.
• The inter-relationship between the library and marketing/client care
No such relationship existed at that time and there was almost no use of the library service for marketing or client care support. The library partner felt this was a potentially valuable service the library could provide.
• Financial management and investment
No budget existed for the library and there was no record of expenditure by the library staff. The library partner estimated that investment in the library was less than 1% of the firm's total turnover, which was seen as too low for such a key resource.
The library partner in part attributed the issues raised by the survey to the lack of professionally qualified library staff. The library had been staffed by a number of people over the previous few years, none of whom had been library or information professionals. The main recommendation following the survey was that the firm should employ a professional librarian who would be expected to be more proactive, build a higher profile within the firm and engage in more communication with the departments. This prompted the firm to recruit a qualified librarian in late 2006, though initially on a temporary basis, who was tasked with updating and listing the collections, a huge task for one person considering the number of satellite collections, and maintaining the existing basic library services such as circulation of periodicals. The librarian employed by the firm in 2006 did not have experience of the law or legal materials, and so was only able to offer a limited research and enquiry service. The librarian was well regarded within the firm and it was generally agreed that they had made improvements in the service, but the fact remained that by late 2007 many of the issues raised by the 2005 survey had not been addressed. This led to the firm's decision to recruit a second person for the library, who would be an experienced legal library manager, to develop the service as a whole and create one that met the needs of an evolving firm.
Relationship building
The theme of the study was of improving services by improving relationships and several methods to achieve this were suggested by the literature on the development, promotion and marketing of library services.
Promotion
Bell (Reference Bell and Scammell2001, p.353), describes how effective promotion can open lines of communication with the rest of the organisation and help to deliver the services people actually want. The manager followed this advice in several ways:
• Writing an article for the firm's newsletter to promote the library services as well as the library's new name, “Library and Information Services”, which was chosen to reflect the wider range of services now being offered.
• Expanding the library intranet pages by adding online access to the catalogue and details of online services the firm subscribed to.
• Personally introducing themselves at department meetings to give a short presentation on their background and experience in legal and business research. Often, requests for research and support rose following attendance at these meetings.
• Arranging demonstrations of new online services, or offering refresher training on existing databases for specific groups.
• Offering help in using databases like Westlaw to create personal, tailored current awareness alerts.
Building on existing relationships
Following the advice of Kumar (Reference Kumar2007) on CRM initiatives, the manager wanted to expand on the librarian's existing relationships with the library representatives for each department. The representatives could provide a good source of information about their group, its needs, aims and future plans, and could also introduce the manager to colleagues within their department. Initial meetings with each representative discussed their needs, asked for feedback on the library service and asked whether they had any improvements to suggest. The meetings were also useful for promoting new services, such as group current awareness, as the representative could then spread the word with colleagues about ways the library could help.
Building relationships with support departments
Like Lamond (Reference Lamond2007), the manager felt that building links with other support departments was important, not only to work together to provide better services to the firm as a whole, but also to offer and provide library services to them. They spent time with the firm's heads of marketing, facilities and HR, to talk about plans for the library service and also to ask how the library could provide support to their teams.
Information needs assessment
Sykes (Reference Sykes and Within Scammell2001, p.111) discusses the role of the information needs assessment in obtaining “current, reliable indications of the types of information required”. One of the methods described is conducting surveys of users, such as the interviews conducted for the case study. The interview format was more helpful than a paper survey because it allowed the manager to enter into a direct dialogue with the legal advisors, and helped build relationships, as well as make provision for improvements in the service. Sykes (Reference Sykes and Within Scammell2001, p.111) also mentions the usefulness of focus groups in ascertaining information needs. When the manager started to develop the library intranet pages, they spoke to new starters to find out what they most needed to know when they joined the firm; they also set up a meeting with the firm's trainees, heavy users of the library resources, who provided many useful ideas.
Networking
Bell (Reference Bell and Scammell2001, p.253) says that information workers are often not good at networking, yet attending their host organisation's events and meetings is a good way to become aware of the issues which affect the organisation. The manager was very keen to use more social methods to get to know people and build up relationships within the firm. This also helped them as a new starter who knew absolutely no-one in the firm. The firm's culture is friendly and focused on building a sense of community and it organises regular social events. It encourages staff to join corporate social responsibility (CSR) events and holds on site yoga and pilates classes. These provided good opportunities to meet a wide variety of staff and form relationships that were not necessarily based on work interests, but could follow into the working day, making it easier to approach colleagues, and for them to approach the manager, on a professional level.
Reporting and financial planning
Maher (Reference Maher and Scammell2001, p.308) calls financial planning a valuable communication tool which is important not just for profile raising but also for justification and survival, as it can show the library as a proactive and integrated part of the organisation's future plans. After several months with the firm the manager wrote a report for the library partner and head of HR giving an overview of improvements and progress made in key areas such as collection development, training, promotion, and research and enquiry support, as well as an indication of how they would like the service to develop. They also produced a budget proposal for the library and included detailed information on expenditure and cost savings to date as well as future, planned expenditure.
Building lasting relationships
Many of the methods of promotion and communication described above are used by information professionals in a one-off initiative according to the literature. The manager had to make sure that these initiatives were ongoing to ensure that the relationships which were formed at these initial meetings were built on and strengthened over time. For example:
• Ensuring regular attendance at department meetings;
• Strengthening contacts with library representatives by sending updates on new titles published or added to the collections, and new products for trial, and by keeping them informed about their library budget and expenditure;
• Regularly reviewing resources with the library representatives to weed out those no longer required and reduce unnecessary expenditure. This not only shows the library to be more cost effective but also frees up budget for newer, more relevant resources in the future;
• Sending monthly reports to the library partner on library activities and key performance indicators such as statistics for research and enquiries. These are passed to the Management Board, helping to spread awareness of aims, initiatives and cost savings among some of the most influential people in the firm;
• Offering regular refresher training to help the lawyers make the most of available resources;
• Writing a regular Library and Information Services update in each issue of the firm's internal newsletter to tell in the firm about library changes and improvements.
Evaluating the success of the process after a nine month period
In order to examine how these relationship-building techniques led to improvements in library services and resources, tangible proof was gathered through:
• Statistics showing changes in library use
• Changing attitudes to the services gathered by an interview-based survey in 2008.
The 2008 survey was conducted with just 11 interviewees, a mixture of trainees, qualified solicitors, partners, heads of department and library representatives with at least one from each legal department. Of course, such a small sample cannot be said to be representative of the firm, but it still produced some useful insights, and it also served as the pilot for a firmwide survey that took place the following year.
Resources and collection development
The 2008 interviews showed considerable improvement since 2005 with all but one interviewee fully confident that the library collections were up to date. This compared to less than half the respondents in 2005.
Figure 1: Number of current awareness requests received by month
Current awareness (CA) services
The CA statistics show this area expanding in popularity after the library increased the number of its current awareness alerts throughout the year, see Figure 1 above. This was the result of consultations with departments offering advice and help in setting up more tailored CA services for individuals and teams. The 2008 interviewees felt more confident that they were being kept aware of significant changes affecting their clients and their area of law than previously.
Training and inductions
Meeting with focus groups of new starters improved inductions, so that new starters were more aware of how the library could help them. The trainee lawyer focus group led to the development of a training programme and resources specifically for trainees, who are relatively new to legal research and asked for extra support. The usage statistics showed that there was greater take up of refresher training by the end of the evaluation period and the 2008 survey showed significant use of the library or training especially compared to the complete lack of this service in 2005.
Research and enquiries
The more aware of the library services the firm became, the more library research enquiries increased. This increase is shown in Figure 2 below. This demonstrated a very tangible improvement in library services provided to the firm, as every enquiry delegated to the library saves time which the lawyers can instead spend on more profitable, client-focused activities. Analysis of the types of enquiries submitted showed that users delegated more complex and time-consuming legal or business research as the study progressed. The 2008 interviewees said they were more confident in delegating this type of research to the library. The interviewees were also asked to rate the research service out of 10, the average score was 8.8, compared to 6.5 in 2005.
Figure 2: Total numbers of enquiries – Nov. 2007 to Nov. 2008
Support for marketing and business development
Attending several marketing team meetings enabled the manager to learn more about the work of the team, offer research support and share information on sources of business information. The marketing team and some legal departments also asked for research assistance with several marketing and business development initiatives, where the library and marketing worked together to provide assistance. The 2008 interviews showed that more than half the 11 interviewees had used this aspect of the library service. This was very encouraging as, by supporting the marketing and business development work of the firm, the library is making a proactive contribution to it (Lamond, Reference Lamond2007), and helping it to survive in today's more competitive business climate, (Kumar, Reference Kumar2007).
Conclusions
The aim of the study was to research and evaluate how building close and enduring relationships between the information services team and the organisation in which they operate, can contribute to the ongoing improvement of legal information services at a London law firm. In analysing the library service prior to the appointment of a library manager the study showed how a lack of promotion and communication between the library and the rest of the firm led to a service which did not fulfill its needs.
Through the study it has been possible to show how relationships have been built with departments and individuals across the whole firm, not just with lawyers but with support teams such as marketing and HR and how these have helped information flow in both directions: from the library to keep users aware of the help available and from the users to keep the library informed of their changing needs. I personally feel that the CRM methods and way of thinking, which focus on putting the internal client first will continue to be of particular use as they are designed to bring long-term and enduring benefits to the firm and its staff.
The study examined key areas of service to show how they had improved. For example, the research and enquiry service expanded to take on more varied and complex enquiry work in areas such as business development and by doing so was receiving many more requests for help than at the start of the study. Although, as has been discussed, the sample of interviewees (c.12% of the firm's lawyers) was small compared with the sample of respondents to the 2005 questionnaire (c.73%), I believe they are still a useful indication of the success of the revamped library services. The results demonstrate an increase and confidence in the use of the library services compared with 2005. There are now increased demands for services such as marketing support, refresher training and current awareness and responses show a marked improvement in the opinion of the library's research work.
This study was mainly concerned with a nine months period and only a longer study would show how enduring the results of these methods could be. However, the study has clearly shown that these early months of work in building, strengthening and maintaining relationships, have been rewarded by tangible improvements in the library service being delivered to the firm. I think the study has also shown that it is possible for even a small team to put these methods into practice and get real benefits from a more proactive approach. Yes, it is hard work, but it is definitely worth the effort and arguably essential for the long-term survival of smaller libraries and their staff in these turbulent times.
