Respond to the 2020-21 What’s Hot and What’s Not Survey here. Although the world was shut down by the pandemic, our friends in
legal tech continued their pursuit of innovation and market share. Most of us had a sense of whiplash and disbelief when the world came to a virtual halt in March 2020. Law librarians who had built digital libraries over the years offered their attorneys a fairly seamless transition to their work from home desktop. Within weeks most legal publishers had developed a special COVID offering. These ranged from free alerts, to primary sources and workflow toolkits. Despite all of these efforts law librarians and knowledge managers faced a gap in COVID coverage. Almost overnight a “gray literature” emerged which major legal publishers were not prepared to track. Governor’s executive orders, county level health department policies, local school boards issued COVID documents and statement through the new social media channels: tweets, texts, .Facebook pages. It was “the year of the skunkworks” for many librarians and knowledge managers who scrambled to capture and analyze the torrent of local, state and national materials.
This year’s survey attempts to capture how both librarians and legal publishers developed resources in response to the pandemic.
