The impact of AI on varied aspects of our professional lives is covered regularly on this blog. It is reshaping legal research, education, and legal practice in ways that threaten to leave us behind if we fail to be proactive. It is why the Future of Law Libraries Initiative gathered professionals from academic, court, firm, and government libraries and allied professions through six regional roundtable to identify what steps we need to take now to ensure an impactful, empowered, ethical future.
The message from these roundtables was clear: legal information professionals must take coordinated action on AI policy, training, and infrastructure. To accomplish this, three main recommendations came out of those discussions.
- Create a Centralized AI Organization
Law library leaders agreed on the need for a shared, profession-wide structure to:
- Connect experts and facilitate collaboration.
- Set shared priorities for AI standards, ethics, and vendor engagement.
- Advocate for legal information professionals in AI discourse.
This organization could take the form of a new consortium or be embedded within an existing network, but its purpose would remain the same: to ensure law libraries have a unified voice and strong presence in AI governance.
- Develop Tiered AI Training for Legal Information Professionals
Ad hoc workshops and webinars are no longer enough. To remain relevant, the profession needs robust, role-based training that builds AI competencies at multiple levels—from awareness to leadership. Training should be hands-on, case-based, and designed to produce practical work products.
A train-the-trainer model could help scale capacity, ensuring that AI knowledge reaches across all library types and staff levels while building long-term expertise.
- Establish a Centralized AI Knowledge Hub
To avoid fragmentation and duplication of effort, roundtable participants recommended creating an open, curated repository governed by legal information professionals. This hub would serve as a durable home for:
- Policies and standards
- Teaching resources and curricula
- Evaluation protocols and case studies
- Model contracts and datasets
By sharing resources openly, the hub would accelerate adoption of best practices and ensure equitable access across institutions of all sizes.
Dig Deeper — Read the White Paper
This initiative produced a white paper that digs deeper into these recommendations, including practical next steps and insights from the roundtable conversations. It’s a valuable resource for anyone thinking about the future of law libraries and AI.
Get Involved
We are forming working groups to move these recommendations forward.
- Steering Committee – Guides the overall vision.
- Consortium Charter Group – Shapes governance and structure.
- Training Development Group – Builds core AI competencies and pilot programs.
- Knowledge Hub Group – Designs the hub and its policies.
More detailed description of the charges, scope of work, and time commitments are outlined in the report. Volunteers should be prepared to commit a year for this first phase.