Hello.

The CALL Private Law Library Special Interest Group met October 2 for the first meeting of the 2024-2025 session.

This year we are going to focus on soft skills in private law libraries, and we started with reviewing statistics and data-driven decision making. These decisions can be as simple as which books to weed based on circulation statistics to as in-depth as which products to cancel based on little use.

We welcomed a number of private law librarians for a rousing discussion on the use of stats, how we make decisions, how we report the statistics to our managing partner / C-level team / lawyers, and everything in between. 

We ended with a round table, as we often do, and came up with some ideas for future sessions, including how private firms bill / don’t bill for online research, how to use the stats to inform new training sessions, and will AI ever be able to run stats for us? 

We concluded with a call for private law librarians to volunteer with CALL’s mentorship program, which is making a comeback this year. If any CALL members are interested in participating, please see the Mentorship Program page.

Marnie Bailey
Manager, Knowledge Services
Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP