In recent years, the number of law librarians in public sector and academic roles has declined. Most notably, the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General (MAG) has reduced the staff of its Toronto-based law library to the point that, as of sometime in 2025, it no longer has a professionally staffed law library.[2] In other words, no actual librarians work at the law library of the Ministry of the Attorney General.[3] This deprofessionalization took place quietly and gradually, with no public announcement, no discussion in the legislature, and no opportunity for public scrutiny.
The MAG is not the only place where the roles of professional law librarians have been diminishing. At the 2026 Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference, Annette Demers, a librarian at the University of Windsor Law Library, described how, as of May 2026, only nine of 23 academic law libraries in Canada have full-time directors, compared to 17 out of 20 law libraries in 2003.[4]
This contrasts with large Canadian law firms, which continue to professionally staff their internal law libraries. A comparison of the staffing levels at six of the largest Toronto-based firms finds that the total number of law librarians at these firms has slightly increased compared to 30 years ago.[5] At the dawn of the AI age, the number of professional librarians working at the large Toronto firms is equal to or higher than the number 30 years ago at the dawn of the Internet age.[6]
What does all this say about the continued role and importance of law librarians and law libraries? Writing in 2005, at a time when it was becoming clear that most legal research could be done from one’s desk, without having to visit a physical law library, Bob Berring asked:
If law libraries can no longer be defined as buildings, and can no longer be viewed as synonymous with the collections of information that they contain, and are no longer the institutions that define legitimate information, then what is their true nature?[7]
Berring answered his question by describing how “the soul of law libraries consists of law librarians” and the work they do.
This post will consider the work that law librarians do and consider how the loss of a professionally staffed library may impact the work of MAG. The intention of this post is not to criticize MAG’s current approach to staffing its library, as staffing decisions involve financial trade-offs and other considerations that the author is not privy to. Rather, the aim is to highlight the possible consequences of this particular approach to staffing. Because the deprofessionalization of the MAG library might have broad implications for all Ontarians, this specific example deserves to be scrutinized more closely.[8] As the largest “law firm” in Ontario,[9] how do the services at the current MAG law library compare to kinds of library services that the lawyers at large private law firms in Ontario enjoy? What effect will a librarian-free library have on the quality of legal services that MAG provides the Province and, by extension, on the public interest generally?
The Largest Law Firm in Ontario
The Ministry of the Attorney General’s mandate is to “[administer] the justice system in Ontario and protect the public”. It is also one of the largest employers of lawyers in the country. Only the federal Department of Justice, sometimes described as “the oldest and biggest law firm in the country,”[10] is a larger employer. With approximately 1600 lawyers, MAG employs more Ontario lawyers than any of the large Canadian law firms.[11] For example, Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, which has the largest count of lawyers in Canada, employs over 850 lawyers nationwide, with over 300 of those based in its Toronto and Ottawa offices. The firm with the largest number of lawyers in its Toronto office, McCarthy Tétrault, employs over 800 lawyers nationwide, with just under half of those based in its Toronto office. If the federal Department of Justice can be described as Canada’s largest law firm, then the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General is easily Ontario’s largest law firm.
The MAG Library
As the largest employer of lawyers in Ontario, MAG has maintained a law library at its 720 Bay St location since it moved there in 1989, expanding from its prior 18 King St. W location.[12] To meet the Ministry’s legal information needs, the MAG library has employed professional staffing, rostering at least three professional law librarians for most of its existence. Following a few years of declining professional and para-professional staffing, the MAG library was reduced to one librarian by 2022 and to zero librarians by 2025.
In a 2023 job posting for a law librarian position, MAG described its library as:
[P]rovid[ing]…reference, research and inter-library loan services to the legal staff of the Ministry of the Attorney General, geographically dispersed in more than 50 locations across the province. In addition, the Library maintains a print and electronic collection of legal texts, journals, law reports, legislation, etc., to support the legal information needs of the Ministry.
The posting went on to spell out the roles that library professionals are best placed to carry out. Roles which were clearly relevant to the work of MAG at the time. These included:
- “Confidential reference/research services”
- Provision of “legal research training to articling/summer students and new Counsel”
- Development “of legal research guides and training materials”
- Identifying general trends to ensure that the MAG library is current and relevant
- Analyzing user requirements and trends
- Reviewing the collection to “ensure it is relevant, comprehensive and current”
- Collection development of Canadian, U.S. and international resources
- Cataloguing, acquisitions, subject analysis, classification, serials control, indexing and circulation, according to professionally accepted library standards
These responsibilities align well with the kinds of responsibilities professional librarians have in large law firm settings, as well as at the Law Society of Ontario’s Great Library, courthouse libraries, and academic law libraries across the province.
Less than two years after this job posting, no law librarians were employed at MAG to provide any of these services.
Why deprofessionalize?
In the absence of any public announcements, we can only speculate on the factors that went into the decline of the MAG library. However, there are a number of “standard” answers that libraries have experienced which can give us a reasonable guess.
When faced with financial pressure, it is common for administrators to see librarian roles as overhead. A hiring freeze has been in place in Ontario since 2018 for “non-essential” public service positions as part of the Ontario Government’s “Public Services Delivered More Efficiently” approach. Because law librarians are not the MAG’s core business, it is easy to see how reducing or not filling law librarian positions may be easier to justify, especially if decision-makers are not actively involved in the legal research process and do not understand the full scope of a librarian’s role. Another recent example of lost librarian positions where the justification was explicitly described as driven by “efficiency” was the elimination of all librarian positions at the Nova Scotia Community College in May 2026.[13]
Another common argument for deprofessionalizing libraries is the idea that most needed resources are online and therefore easily accessed. In recent years, the Ontario government has closed or significantly reduced several ministry libraries, including those at the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Education, Northern Development and Mines, and the Office of the Chief Coroner. No doubt widespread digital access to many of the materials required by these units informed these decisions. Legal information is of course also primarily accessed digitally. It is not a stretch to imagine that broad (and sometimes free) access to digital law played a role in the deprofessionalization of the MAG library.
The emergence of generative AI creates new challenges to perceptions of the utility of law librarian roles. While the “it’s all online” argument still leaves room for law librarian expertise in conducting research, organizing legal information and training students and associates, the extreme version of the generative AI argument assumes that the task of working through, synthesizing, making sense of and applying the fruits of research can now be largely outsourced to the machine. In the four years since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, Generative AI has penetrated all aspects of legal work, including legal research. This rapid adoption, of course, raises a number of issues, including concerns around hallucinations, the ethics of undeclared use, the corresponding problem of the need to verify the outputs of generative AI (the “verification paradox”),[14] as well as pedagogical issues around how law students and new lawyers learn about the law.
At this early stage of AI adoption, it seems premature, if not dangerous, to eliminate the roles of a profession whose primary competency is assessing and working with complex legal information sources, including, of course, the sources required to verify generative AI outputs.[15]
What is lost?
As a provincial ministry that is “protecting the public by delivering a wide range of legal services”, what impact will the deprofessionalization of the MAG library have on the public interest?
A) Reduction in Legal Research Quality
Legal research is a complex enterprise.
This complexity arises from the jurisdictions covered, the variety of sources available, their historical organization over time, and the research tools developed to navigate them.
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Legal information is further complicated by the variety of players in the marketplace, which includes governments, non-profit content providers, and particularly, the legal publishing industry. The industry is competitive and evolving. Legal information is costly, and available in many places, and not all content is available from all providers.
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Overlaying artificial intelligence on this complexity makes the work of the legal information professional even more critical in today’s legal information landscape.[16]
In large law firm and academic settings, law librarians regularly perform complex legal research – particularly research that is historical and/or interjurisdictional or international. This is because the skill sets law librarians possess make them the most likely people in any organization to have a broad understanding of all the sources of legal information, as well as how to use them appropriately.
Given that all of the large Ontario-based law firms have professional law librarians in their ranks, it is reasonable to expect that without this role that MAG is placing itself – and therefore the interests of Ontario and Ontarians at a disadvantage when facing these law firms.
A potential counterargument is that complex legal research is uncommon and that the tools available to lawyers simplify the process to the extent that the expertise of law librarians is less needed. While it is true that tools have improved, they are not designed to perform tasks such as, for example, i) tracing a statute and all its amendments back to its pre-Confederation origins, or ii) identifying what protections exist for industrial designs in each common law African jurisdiction. And of course, any AI tool that provides an answer to these questions would need to be checked against traditional sources (the verification paradox), a skill that not all practicing lawyers possess.
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