I know a few law librarians.

I make no secret of it.

Some of them have been essential in making Slaw a success — and only in part because they "got" IT light years ahead of the legal profession generally. Some have been engines driving the creation of powerful institutions of legal learning. Some have even been known to play vital roles in firms that practice law.

Why, then, do law firms hide their law librarians as if they were . . . dipsomaniac uncles and aunts?

I don't say that firms sequester them in dank, windowless quarters. Or that they hustle them behind the arras when company comes to call. That sort of behaviour would be unmannerly. But I am curious about why it is that on law firm websites you're hard pressed to find mention of librarians, let alone profile pages extolling their merits and accomplishments.

At least, it seemed that way to me. So I checked out the websites of ten Canadian law firms chosen by the not at all scientific method of adopting the current LexisNexis Martindale Hubbell Top 10 Rankings for the most visible Canadian firms: Borden Ladner Gervais LLP, McCarthy Tétrault LLP, Stewart McKelvey, Bennett Jones LLP, Heenan Blaikie LLP, Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP, Miller Thomson LLP, Ogilvy Renault LLP, Davis LLP, Dougall Gauley, and McMillan LLP. I even gave these websites a break, because I came to the test already armed with the names of the firms' librarians.

You can see a chart of my results below—click on the image to enlarge it. (You can get the PDF here.) My basic procedure was first to use a site's search function to search for the librarian's name; then I used relevant menu items to seek the librarians; and finally I did a Google search within the firm's site (using [site:] to catch any pages that the firm's webmaster might have missed in setting up the directory or menu.

Things were better than I'd assumed and still far from the way they should be. A librarian should be regarded—and publicized—as a valued member of the team that services clients. This would mean, I'd argue, that firms should give their librarians proper profile pages and make certain that visitors can find them, even when they don't come knowing the librarian's name as I did.

I'm not naive enough to think that there's no pecking order in the practice of law, or that anyone whose role begins with "L" is at the top of it. But even a pyramid of puffery such as law's needn't so rigorously consign law librarians to below-ground obscurity. (I'd argue that the firms that ditch the old class system are those most likely to prosper in the coming years — but that's another story.) It smacks of defensiveness or of some unconscious attempt at payback for first year law school LRW. Whatever the motives, it's downright silly for firms not to feature their librarians on their websites.

Why would they want to do this? The prime reason may be to accord some "cost free" recognition to the importance of current awareness and research and to those who provide it. But at a simpler practical level, it's wrong to assume that the people who come to a firm's website do so only to discover a lawyer or the latest newsletter on securities law; there are those, few though they may be, who actually do want to get in touch with the centre of the firm's intelligence network. Oh, and a final reason: it's churlish not to.