Practising Law Librarian

The Practising Law Librarian features interviews with law librarian professionals from an array of backgrounds and organizations. Join host Karen Oesterle, of PLI’s Legal Information Services team, to learn about trends, resources, and fresh ideas from peers in your profession.

Practising Law Librarian is a education podcast hosted by Practising Law Institute, with 26 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Practising Law Institute hosts Practising Law Librarian, a education show with 26 episodes published.

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  Episode #33

  Law Librarian Errol Adams' Intriguing Path

  Oct 1, 202636 min

  Errol Adams discusses his career path from government legal work to law librarianship, describing roles at the Department of Corrections, New York City Civil Courts, academia, and now Cooley LLP, where he manages legal resources, vendor relationships, and database strategy. He reflects on how each setting shaped his expertise and explains why the move from academia to a law firm brought new challenges and intellectual variety. A major theme of the interview is leadership and advocacy. Errol highlights his work advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the law library profession, including helping establish the Black Law Librarians SIS and founding DEI initiatives within professional organizations. He also shares insights on mentoring, navigating the profession as a Black and Indo-Guyanese gay man, and creating research tools and collections that improved access to legal information for students, faculty, and researchers.

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  Episode #32

  Why Librarians Matter More Than Ever

  Oct 1, 202646 min

  Cas Laskowski, Head of Research, Data, and Instruction at the University of Arizona’s law library, discusses how law librarianship is evolving from traditional legal research support into a more interdisciplinary, forward-facing role shaped by data, technology, and AI. Cas describes a career path from geospatial work and law school to librarianship, driven by a love of research, writing, and helping people access meaningful information. The conversation highlights Cas’s work in empirical research, innovation labs, AI instruction, and leadership within the law library community. A central theme is empowerment—using information, data, and thoughtful guidance to expand access to justice and help students, scholars, and communities navigate complex systems. Cas also emphasizes the need for law librarians to act as curators and critical guides in an AI-saturated information landscape, and encourages colleagues to build strong professional networks rather than trying to master everything alone.

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  Episode #31

  Inside Legal Tech with Sarah Glassmeyer

  Aug 26, 20261 hour

  Sarah Glassmeyer, Director of Data Curation at Legal Tech Hub, traces her path from academic law librarian to legal tech, sparked by the 2008 downturn and the free law movement, then through roles at CALI (including open casebooks and document-automation expert systems), a Harvard fellowship focused on free law, the ABA Center for Innovation, and RainCourt before joining Legal Tech Hub. She explains Legal Tech Hub’s advisory, content, and product-directory work, including maintaining a catalog of 3,000+ legal tech tools and tracking attributes such as deployment and AI use. She discusses how librarian skills—taxonomy, cataloging, vendor interviewing, and research—translate directly to legal tech and urges firms and vendors to involve librarians in tech selection and adoption. She also weighs GenAI’s benefits in lowering barriers against risks like hallucinated legal content, cost, infrastructure demands, and unequal access to advanced tools.

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  Episode #30

  Innovation in the Stacks with Jenny Wondracek

  Jul 14, 202647 min

  Jenny Wondracek, director of the law library and professor of legal research and writing at Capital University Law School, shares her path from practicing law at North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services to an academic law library career spanning Barry, Elon, University of Florida, UNT Dallas (helping launch a new law library), and her upcoming move to Southern Methodist University as director of the Underwood Law Library. She reflects on how law libraries have shifted from print Shepherd’s and judge-required print research to today’s generative AI landscape, and describes tools she has built, including early browser toolbars, AI prompting worksheets, a tracker of AI hallucination cases, and immersive 360-degree stack tours to teach citations and library resources. Wondracek also discusses teaching AI-neutral research skills, community and bar education, leadership lessons from professional associations, and the growing challenges of misinformation and interdisciplinary research.

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  Episode #29

  Carla Wale on Law Libraries, AI, and Leading Through Change

  Jul 14, 202652 min

  Carla Wale, a senior academic law librarian and program director, discusses her path into law librarianship and the degrees she pursued (JD, MLIS, MBA, and an online M.Ed. focused on pedagogy, access, and inclusion). She reflects on how law libraries have shifted from “just in case” print collecting to electronic “just in time” access, and how licensing raises new concerns around copyright limits, data privacy, FERPA, and vendor tracking—making enterprise contracts and data agreements essential. She describes arriving at the University of Washington during COVID, updating collection policy and documentation, expanding remote consultations and hybrid teaching with a high-flex classroom, and launching an online modality for the law librarianship program. She also outlines the library’s role as in-house generative AI experts, training students and clinics on responsible use while adopting tools like Harvey and university-supported AI.

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