American Lawyer Publishes Article On State Of USA Law Library Budgets | Practice Source - Legal News and Views

And the news isn’t good for the libraries or for publishers. The latest American Lawyerr survey estimates that budgets had shrunk at 46% of USA law firms this year compared to only 9% last year

Here are some snippets from Alan Cohen’s article to further depress you all

57 percent of firms paring their library payroll, up from 18 percent in 2008. (Librarians at 86 Am Law 200 firms completed our 2009 survey.)Resources are on the chopping block, too. Indeed, the librarians who still have their jobs are being asked to become detectives of a sort, tracking, graphing, and reporting on their firm’s use of every research tool. As one library director — who, like many of her counterparts, requested anonymity — put it: “Nothing is a sacred cow anymore. Everything must be reviewed, and there must be a palatable [return on investment] for each use.”
“We’re having some good conversations, and that’s giving us reductions,” says Robert Oaks, chief library and records officer at Latham & Watkins. “We’ve been able to cut our print budget a bit over 12 percent and our electronic budget a little less than 10 percent.”
But at the same time, some librarians fear that management is getting a bit too gung ho with the cost-cutting. “In the past we had budget cuts, but we were given targets,” says the head librarian at a blue-chip New York firm. “They’d tell us to cut it 10-15 percent, and we’d come in around 7 or 8. You got yelled at, but you didn’t lose your job. Now they are serious. It’s no longer a target.”
Last year just 7 percent of librarians mostly or totally disagreed with recent decisions made regarding the library. This year the figure was 16 percent. Similarly, in 2008, a mere 3 percent were dissatisfied with their job. In 2009, 8 percent were unhappy.

And this? will be scaring the big publishers…

“The technology has only now developed to the point where a large law firm that wants to monitor 1,000 resources can do so,” says Steven Lastres, the director of library and knowledge management at Debevoise & Plimpton, which has been testing Onelog for the past six months. “We can see who is using a database and how long they are using it, how many views a newsletter is getting,” he says. The tools “will alert a lawyer that there may be a more cost-effective alternative than the resource they selected,” Lastres adds.

These systems don’t come cheap. One law firm that is considering LookUp Precision says that for its needs — tracking about 1,000 different databases — the ballpark figure is $100,000 a year. “The idea is that the ultimate savings could be substantial,” says this firm’s librarian, “because when it comes to our renewal decisions, we’ll have factual information in addition to anecdotal evidence. There are a lot of bizarre and complex pricing models out there, and we need to know if they are justified.”

The metrics can be compelling: A firm paying for 200 user licenses for a product may discover that only 50 lawyers are actually using it (a scenario that has become common, library chiefs say, given so many attorney layoffs). Suddenly that resource may not be indispensable. And suddenly the vendors may budge. One library director who uses advanced tracking software says that he has not paid any increases in subscription costs this year. Pointing to the metrics, he told vendors that their products don’t provide enough bang for the buck. “In many cases I was actually able to realize a savings over what we had previously paid,” he says.

Yet even with the stats and the sharpened bargaining skills, costs for electronic re sources other than LexisNexis and Westlaw rose in 2008, with the average firm spending just over $1 million, compared to some $929,000 in 2007. (Lexis and Westlaw spending decreased slightly.)

Library chiefs say there are a number of explanations. First, there is the emergence of resources just now grabbing the attention of lawyers — expensive tools such as Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ. One prominent firm pays over $100,000 a year so that ten users, firmwide, can access this database, which contains in-depth information and financials on public and private companies. (The firm’s library chief says it has become one of the firm’s most important research tools.) Second, library directors say, it’s not always the vendor who caves in negotiations. “There are times when top management will decide a resource is critical, no matter the price,” says one library chief.

And the survey can be found at ( you’ll have to be a registered subscriber to access it)?? http://www.law.com/jsp/tal/PubArticleTAL.jsp?id=1202432942985&slreturn=1&hbxlogin=1