Information Literacy and Attorneys

It’s so rainy and cloudy outside, but I’m absolutely stoked because the clouds coming in are rolling over in front of the mountains.  For a southern gal like me, this is nothing short of supernatural – just more in the sense of being super amazing and natural as opposed to being, you know…supernatural. 

On that note, rainy days just make you think of books, don’t they?  I always want to curl up by the window and read.  And since I’m a graduate (how weird is that?), I don’t even have to feel guilty for reading for fun instead of for study!  Despite that, I’ve been looking into books I can read to further my knowledge of law libraries.  Instead, I managed to lead myself astray and I am now looking at a book called “Lawtalk” which is kind of hilarious as it discusses the legal jargon that gets tossed around in every day conversation, and how it started.  Very amusing.

I guess I’ll just continue to use AALL as my source for learning more about being a law librarian for now.  There are great people who are willing to answer all sorts of questions, and the discussions are very informative.  Recently we were talking about information literacy and how to entice attorneys to participate in training.  Some of the ideas were silly and fun, and others were more complicated but would be very beneficial.  Here’s what we came up:

• Set out coffee and donuts.  It’s an attorney trap.  Each time they come up to get a donut, you start an information literacy conversation with them and show them a few tricks if you have time.  By the time they’re done eating their donuts, you’ve had their attention for 5 to 10 minutes, so you’re sort of “sneaking” the training in.
  
• Have a lunch-and-learn session once every few months.  The private firm or library can provide a catered lunch (sandwiches, salads, pizza, whatever’s edible…).  The attorneys eat their lunch in the conference room while you force feed them a presentation of different searching techniques and services the library can provide.
  
• This one needs a bit more research, but I think it would be very effective: Get your training course certified so the attorneys receive CLE credits for taking it.  Then, especially near the end of the year when they’re scrambling for their last few credits, make sure you broadcast in the area that you are offering a legal information literacy course worth CLE credits! 

All of these options have their pros and cons, but I think that using all three of them in a combination would really promote information literacy among attorneys.  Now I just have to figure out how to implement them all on my library staff of one.