This report presents detailed data from 44 law libraries in the USA and Canada with data broken out separately by size of library and for law firm libraries, university law libraries, courthouse libraries, and all other.
The study gives its readers detailed benchmarking data on current and future spending plans, with specific data sets for the overall budget, payroll, salaries, overall materials spending, online information, print information, reporters, legal and other scholarly journals, books (eBook and print) purchased from Amazon, books purchased from all other sources, subscription blogs, seminars and professional development and more. The study also looks at spending plans on particular suppliers of legal information.
In addition to the detailed spending data, the report takes a careful look at some of the major trends affecting law librarianship and includes data on percentage of work time spent at home vs the office, use of overall space for the law library, use of artificial intelligence, including ChatGPT, Bard, Bing and Llama. The report also looks at use of artificial intelligence applications embedded in the products of major legal services providers.
Just a few of the many findings of this 87-page report are:
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Survey respondents were spending a mean of about 27% of their overall work time working from home.
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Librarians sampled expect a mean increase in salaries of approximately 4.17% over the next year.
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25% of law firm librarians thought the economic outlook for their parent organization over the next year was excellent.
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Courthouse libraries in the sample accounted for almost all spending on print reporters.
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More than 46% of university law librarians in the sample say that use of artificial intelligence has made them more productive.