Many talented and experienced law librarians are feeling threatened as their increasing salaries and middle management positioning on firms' staff hierarchical graphs render them extremely desirable targets for elimination in the current environment of law firm downsizing.
To avoid the inevitable ceiling that exists for the head of the law firm library, the librarian must redefine the position in the firm, and work diligently to change the firm's perception of the position's boundaries. The long-term goal of the librarian should be to become the equivalent of the chief information officer (CIO) of a corporation. An area where it may be easiest to justify an expansion of responsibility is in the coordination of various research projects being performed for marketing and new client assessment. A major contribution to a firm would be to streamline such research with the simultaneous development or improvement of an automated conflicts system. The need for a conflicts database is discussed and recommendations for developing the database are presented.