My 4 Takeaways from the 2022 AALL Annual Meeting

After a day of rest to collect my thoughts and return my body to sea level, I find myself still wanting to write about the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Annual Meeting. That in itself is interesting to me—after three days for me (including a Sunday), four articles and a whole lot of chatting, I’m usually fully burnt out on conferences. But maybe it’s a function of not being at a large conference since Legalweek in March, or maybe it’s the show itself, but I’m feeling alright.

Plus, I think there’s a lot to talk about with AALL. Here’s my main takeaways from the panels, conversations, and overall feel of the conference after three days in Denver.

1. It’s All About the Data

I was a bit surprised about how many conversations I was having about data—collecting data, granting access to data, using data, creating data and storing data. But I probably shouldn’t have been. The law library community have historically been stewards of the organization, making sure that all of the law school or law firm’s research information is organized and accessible for all. It’s just that today, a lot of that information is in a database rather than in a row of books, meaning that law librarians have had to become fluent in the language of APIs and data transfers quite quickly.

We write a lot about information governance here, but a lot of times it’s in the context of litigation or risk management: How can you best organize your data so that it can be used in discovery, or so that it’s not a liability to the organization? While I didn’t necessarily hear the term “info gov” at AALL, though, it’s clear that it was everywhere. And talking about possible use cases for data is an easy way that a legal organization’s library staff and business leaders can get on the same page, quickly.

2. Education Innovation

In the last panel I sat in, on supporting remote and hybrid library professionals, Fredrikson & Byron’s Susan Trombley presented some interesting demographic data about the make-up of AALL’s membership: 44% academic librarians from law schools or other educational pursuits, 36% from the law firm/corporate work, 15% from government, and 4% other. That rings true to my experience, both in the conversations I had as well as the conference’s speakers. While I’m used to speaking to many people in the law firm and corporate worlds, this conference had much more of an academic feel to it.

That might not be for everybody—while there were certainly conversations about the business of law, it’s rather tough to find common ground between law school and law firm budgets. Instead, the conversations centered around learning what’s best for the legal community, and how innovation can lead to better and more equitable outcomes for the legal community. Indeed, at least three or four of the panels I sat in on started with some form of “we just published a book/law review article/paper about X,” most of which were centered on advancing law’s applications and accessibility in the U.S. It’s a perspective that I don’t receive as often, and should honestly be seeking out more, which is why I’m glad it gave me all sorts of future story ideas.

3. All in the Hall

Most people I talked to said they were pleasantly surprised by the conference’s attendance this year, seeing as it was the first in-person AALL Annual Meeting since 2019. AALL told me it will have official attendance figures later today, but those I talked with estimated between 800-1,000 people, which rings true with my experience. A few different sessions I was in were standing room only, while a few others (particularly in larger rooms with round tables) would hit about 40% capacity. That mix is nothing new to a conference in a larger space like the Colorado Convention Center though, and no place where I went truly felt empty. That was particularly true in the exhibit hall, where during the times set aside for networking, there seemed to be a steady flow of attendees. That attendee base also seemed very engaged with the products they were demoing and happy to learn about what tech improvements were coming down the road.

There were two slight issues I noticed though: One was an overall dearth of new products actually being displayed at the show. I was told by a few vendors that they wanted to have something new to exhibit, but because of either R&D delays, marketing budgets or elsewhere, it wasn’t ready for AALL. That stood in stark contrast to CLOC two months ago, which had a lot more product news (for a different market, granted) than I was expecting.

Second, walking through the exhibit hall solidifies just how stratified the legal research vendor market currently is. You absolutely couldn’t miss the grand spectacles of the Bloomberg Law, Fastcase, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer booths. For some of the start-ups in the space who desperately desire face-time, I could see how they might feel swallowed up.

4. COVID’s Still Around

Many of the attendees at AALL acknowledged the fact that, indeed, we are still in a pandemic. I’d estimate that about half of the conference was masked at any one time, and that number may have actually been even higher for the speakers. That mask rate is certainly higher than the general population, which I think may also be a function of many of the speakers coming from academic settings as noted above. Combined with mandatory vaccination to enter the conference, I never felt unsafe.

Still, COVID was a bit tough to ignore. Maybe I got unlucky with the sessions I chose, but four of the five panels I watched had at least one scheduled speaker absent from the event. Only once did the remaining speakers specifically call out COVID to explain the absences, but reading between the lines that many of these call-outs seemed very last minute, the reasoning seemed clear to me. I appreciated one speaker who sent in remarks via video, which were played at specific times on a projector during the presentation. Assuming that this virus isn’t going away any time soon, I’m curious how ILTACON, which undoubtedly expects a higher turnout than 2021, and other upcoming legal conferences will handle similar absences.