By Suzanne Arist, Informant Committee Member and Reference Librarian
Laura Ikens is President-Elect of the Illinois Chapter of the SLA. She is a Senior Research Specialist in the Legal Technology Resources Center [1]at the American Bar Association. The ABA is the largest voluntary professional association in the world with over 411,000 members.
The association provides law school accreditation, continuing legal education, information about law, programming to assist lawyers and judges with their work and projects to improve the legal system for the public. The Chicago office of the ABA has about 700 employees.
Laura and the two other LTRC staff—all three are former law librarians—serve ABA members and others who call the association’s hotline or email questions. The Legal Technology Resource Center staff answer questions regarding the use of technology in law offices.
Since most attorneys are either solo practitioners or work in small firms, they don’t have information technology staff, so they utilize the LTRC’s expertise. To further assist these attorneys, the LTRC conducts continuing education seminars on technology for law offices. LTRC staff also give interviews to the press on timely legal topics.
Typical reference questions range from “What kind of legal-specific software is appropriate for Macs?” to “How can we go to a paperless office?” to “I’m starting my own law firm--what kind of technology do I need?”
ENTRY INTO LEGAL TECHNOLOGY
Laura has a Bachelor of Science degree from Northwestern University in Economics. She worked in securities, banking, investments, and law. Her employment experience includes management of the securities vault for the Midwest Stock Exchange, now the Chicago Stock Exchange, and a support role for high net-worth clients of Stein Roe Investment Counsel.
While at Stein Roe, Laura had what she describes as an epiphany, and began library school. She attended the University of Illinois at Champaign via the LEEP program, their distance learning program. Still in school, Laura took a position with Joanne Kiley at Michael, Best & Friedrich and later moved to the ABA.
There have been some changes at the LTRC during the two years Laura has been there. Changes have occurred in electronic discovery and records management. The LTRC staff use a wiki to share information and the staff has moved its monthly newsletter to a proprietary blog.
Laura anticipates her department’s use will grow as technology proliferates. Attorneys will need LTRC’s help just to do their jobs as efficiently as possible.
WEALTH OF EXPERTISE
Laura brings great expertise to her role as President-Elect of the Illinois Chapter of the SLA. She is responsible for meeting planning. This includes book-clubs, dine-arounds, programming, continuing education, and dinner arrangements. As President-Elect, Laura is learning more about the organization on a chapter and national level so she will be prepared to assume the duties of President in 2008.
Last year Laura was the Public Relations Committee Chair. She implemented the new weekly calendar email and developed a PR plan. Prior to that, she was co-chair of Dinner Arrangements Committee. Laura has been a member since she was a library school student. She signed up as a student member with every library association to learn what each was doing.
At the national level of SLA, Laura organized a program with Michael St. Onge. He is the Senior Librarian Relations Consultant for LexisNexis.
Her writing has been published. She co-authored an article with Joanne Kiley for the Legal Information Alert and wrote articles for Law Technology News. She writes "Trend Reports" and "Executive Summary" for the ABA Legal Technology Survey.
The LTRC surveys about 30,000 members of ABA who are attorneys in private practice and the attorneys provide information about their use of technology. Then the LTRC produces a five-volume compilation of the results. Laura does the number-crunching, creates the product, and writes all of the analysis pieces for the survey.
‘ASSOCIATIONS ARE GREAT PLACES’
When not at work, Laura takes humanities classes at the University of Chicago in the Basic Program. She reads a lot and is learning to knit. She goes to a gym and has run half marathons. Also she volunteers for the Gift of Hope Organ and Tissue Donor Network [2]occasionally with her husband, a double lung recipient, and also for the American Lung Association. And she finds time to socialize with friends and family.
Advice Laura would give to a library school student who wants to work with an association, would be: “Learn the structure of the organization, so that you know how you would fit in. Association work is very different from corporate work, and it helps to know what you’re getting into.”
When asked to recall an anecdote that would be of interest to Informant readers, she described the September SLA Chapter meeting. The keynote speaker’s flight to Chicago was cancelled because of bad weather. She immediately found a replacement speaker from the Chapter’s membership and the program went on without a hitch. Illinois Chapter members, like librarians in general, are undaunted by obstacles.
Reach Laura Ikens at ikensl@staff.abanet.org [3].