#law-librarianship

#law-librarianship

"As a longtime leader in this space, we believe we have a responsibility to help prepare the next generation of lawyers to keep pace with where the legal industry is today and where it's headed," said Phil Saunders, the CEO of Relativity, in a press release Tuesday.

Asia Carrera, whose real name is Jessica Steinhauser, graduated from St. Mary's Law in 2024 and cleared the Texas bar exam after a previous near miss by just two points.

The legal profession rewards endurance, precision and control. It also quietly normalizes stress, isolation and overextension. For patent practitioners and other IP lawyers, the pressures are uniquely acute: compressed prosecution deadlines, high-stakes litigation exposure, often unrealistic client-driven budget constraints, regulatory whiplash at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and increasingly complex technologies layered with global filing and prosecution strategy.

Librarians have been actively collaborating and talking about it almost every day, whether it's creating tutorials and digital learning objectives or thinking about the conversations to have with instructors. It can feel like cognitive dissonance to be actively working with AI on a regular basis and also saying we're constantly thinking about the harms and the biases.

As part of the newly created Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS) survey, colleges must submit years of disaggregated admissions data-including the test scores, grade point averages, race, sex and income ranges of applied, admitted and enrolled students dating as far back as 2019. The data collection is part of an effort to verify that universities aren't considering race in admissions decisions after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of such practices in 2023.

Effective discovery requires more than compliance - it requires strategy. Litigators can balance expansive discovery rights and privacy concerns without slowing cases down through practical, results-focused approaches that consider proportionality, electronically stored information management, and the specific discovery rules applicable to their jurisdiction.

AI will replace some tasks, reshape many roles, and change how legal services get delivered, but it is far less likely to replace the full lawyer function where judgment, strategy, persuasion, and accountability still drive value.

A year or so ago, most legal departments were still testing. AI pilots. Workflow trials. Small process experiments. Everyone was learning cautiously. The stakes were relatively low, and the work was labeled "innovation," which made imperfection forgivable. Then something shifted. Those same pilots became part of day-to-day delivery, and the business started relying on them. Sometimes intentionally, because early results looked good.