Legal Research

Morrison Foerster Moves Library to Marketing Department

By Connie Crosby

Over on 3 Geeks and a Law Library, Greg Lambert makes note that yesterday at the Law Marketing Association conference, Joe Calve, the new CMO of Morrison Foerster mentioned he had moved their Library department  into the Marketing department. Lambert questions the change, but does say, “From what I’m hearing from the Librarians at MoFo, they are excited about the change and are looking forward to the transition.” MoFo is known for doing things a bit differently than everyone else, after all.

I do think it odd, but perhaps no odder than having the Library report to IT as in some organizations. I see the Library ideally as a parallel department supporting Marketing as well as other departments. But it likely depends on the organization and culture of the firm as well as its overall strategy. What I can think of to support this move:

• if the Library is doing competitive intelligence as a major initiative
• if the Library is doing a lot of proactive business intelligence research to support business development
• if the Library is involved in website development and maintenance
• if the Library contributes substantially to the extensive Client Alerts and Newsletters put out by the firm
• Marketing often has better financial support in a firm than the Library or even IT so it can help secure better resources for the Library

Embedding a librarian or two in the Marketing department would be ideal, but I’m not sure about moving the whole department there. What happens to the whole research function and the administration of resources to support areas other than Marketing?

Greg Lambert is going to try to find out more about the change to help flesh out the reasoning. My question for Slaw readers: does this change make sense to you? What other reasons can you think of for/against this move? I still need some convincing.

Photo: Explore by Kevin Dooley – made available on Flickr under Creative Commons.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on March 11, 2010 (boomark / email).