SpeechBubbles

Welcome to Part 2 of this series, where we will cover specific marketing opportunities that currently exist for the law firm library. Most of these examples are opportunities hiding in plain sight and already part of a law librarian’s current day-to-day responsibilities. The key is to shift our perspective to recognize and take advantage of the marketing value of these responsibilities.

Part 1, available here, examined the value and need for marketing the law library.

  • New hire trainings/orientation – What if you had the opportunity to individually meet with your potentially highest usage patrons for 30-60 minutes before they learned and developed bad research habits? Law firm librarians who have the opportunity to conduct new hire orientations have a huge self-marketing advantage. The initial library orientation is fundamentally important to developing a new hire’s future relationship with the library. If you are lucky enough to work in a firm where a library orientation is standard for a new hire, congratulations! If not, it would be wise to consult with HR to see if you can establish orientations as a common procedure. During the orientation itself, rather than go through the nuances and heavy details of every research product you have, it is centrally important to use this opportunity to market the services of the library. The most important piece of information that can be conveyed to your new hire in this situation is how they can contact a librarian for help in the future. Giving an overview of the research products your firm has is great, as is establishing the expertise your department has with regards to these research products, but the real benefit of these sessions is to begin a relationship with another potential patron.
  • Internal presentations – More often than not, every individual department inside a law firm has regularly scheduled meetings. Practice groups, of course, have periodic meetings, but so do non-attorney groups such as paralegals and marketing. This structure is very advantageous to law firm librarians; our patron base does the legwork of organizing itself and segmenting itself into groups with specific research needs. More advantageous is that meeting organizers are typically in search of and receptive to programming;
    Copyright 2014, International Transport Forum
    Copyright 2014, International Transport Forum

    in my experience, offers to give short presentations on the library’s services are generally approved and encouraged. When the presentation is green-lit, the librarian is benefitted by having a captive, specialized audience for whom it’s easy to custom tailor the presentation. As for the presentations themselves I have found you can never assume your audience knows what the typical, modern law firm library does. And again, it pays to emphasize, more than anything else, how audience members can contact the library. The goal for this type of exercise is visibility, to make departments aware of the library, and to possibly expand your client base.

  • The Firm’s Intranet Page – Law firm libraries have a huge advantage in having an internal, organized patron-base; we do not serve a far-spread, scattered public or student body. A firm’s intranet home page isolates this patron-base perfectly. The intranet home page is viewed by presumably everyone in the firm, and because of its reach, it makes for an excellent distribution channel for marketing intranetmessages. More beneficially, these pages are usually in need of quick content. A message stating how many reference requests the library group has answered is an excellent way to quickly and effectively reach out; the message is quick, easily digested, hits all potential patrons, and establishes the relevancy of the department. The goal, again, is to promote awareness of the library—the A in AIDA as we covered in part 1—and posting a brief message on the firm’s intranet page is a great way of achieving this goal.
  • Event marketingEvent marketing entails promoting the law library via a themed event. At a basic level, the event is organized around entertaining activities that promote face-to-face contact with your patrons; games and demonstrations, for example, encourage patron participation, all the while promoting the law library. Notably, vendors are typically very receptive towards contributing to marketing events. You really have nothing to lose when you ask a vendor for assistance. In the past, vendors have donated prizes, led demonstrations, and sent representatives to help organize events we have hosted. Vendor receptiveness is logical: event marketing events are mutually beneficial for the library and vendors. The library contributes the legwork of organizing potential users and customers for vendors, while the vendors keep potential users and customers interested via gamification scenarios and the chance to win prizes, all under the auspice of promoting the library. Celebrating National Library Week is a great opportunity to employ event marketing; the week-long structure gives ample time to multiple vendors, and encourages daily events/more opportunities to event market. In 2016, according to ALA, National Library Week will occur April 10th-16th.
  • Host internal workshops – Vendor presentations and workshops are pretty common in law firms. Remotely, vendors consistently offer webinars to showcase new software and updates. And in-person, vendors make weekly visits to our firm to provide hands-on training. Law firm libraries do a great job of hosting vendor workshops, and connecting vendors to attorneys. There is much value to these activities: they generate interest about research offerings, improve research literacy, and even promote the library. But, we shouldn’t leave this activity just to vendors. Consider offering librarian-hosted workshops. The benefits of librarian-hosted workshops are numerous including clear promotion of the library, promotion of the individual librarian’s research expertise, and a more honest examination of resource strengths and weaknesses. The methodology of delivering the workshops can be similar to what vendors already provide: webinars or in-house presentations regarding specific areas of research (some example topics could be: public records, corporation searches, docket alerts and tracks, etc). Again, this is an activity that generates awareness about the library, as well as establishes the expertise of librarians over their research products.
  • Embedded librarians – At this point the concept of “library as a service, not a space” is likely second nature to law librarians; and embedded librarianship probably more accurately reflects your typical work environment and setting. Broadly, an embedded librarian is a library professional who still performs the duties of a librarian, but does not necessarily work inside a physical library. Rather, the embedded librarian is physically embedded among the patrons they support–in our case: the attorneys and support staff. To view the concepts of library-as-a-service and embedded librarianship specifically through the lens of marketing ourselves, we have to recognize the value the visibility our new situation affords us. Again, marketing must have the goal of generating awareness; being physically present in the environment of our patrons achieves this goal.

In review, the above examples show activities and responsibilities law librarians are typically already fulfilling. The key is to view these day-to-day responsibilities from the context of marketing, and really exploit the potential for marketing these activities possess. In short: go out and be seen!