Jake Hearn is a legal information professional. He has just taken the next step in his career after three years with a London-based legal firm with an international reach. He talks to Rob Green about his first role and making the transition from student to professional, and why it pays to keep an open mind.

A well-trodden path from Weekend Assistant in a public library to a career as an information professional may sound familiar to many readers. Legal information professional Jake Hearn is one of those who have followed the path, but as he points out there are many different routes along the way.

He has recently joined his second legal organisation after a successful three years in his first post, which he began as an MA Student on UCL’s LIS course. Jake says: “My first experience of working in libraries was during my time at college when I was an A-Level student and I secured a Saturday job in my local public library. This is probably a recognisable trope for many people in the profession today. I worked in Essex Public libraries for eight years, while I was in full-time education – A-Levels first, then a four-year degree and then my first Masters degree.”

Commitment

In 2015, Jake graduated from his Master’s degree, in environmental literature, he then worked as a special educational needs teaching assistant. However, this was only a temporary position and in 2016, he was looking for another post and successfully applied for a role as library assistant at a local FE and HE college. His experience working in public libraries helped, and Jake says: “It was at that point that I decided to make the commitment to the profession and do the MA degree. So I started that while I was working at the college as a library assistant.

“It was in 2018, half way through my degree at UCL, that a job came up at a law firm. I applied, was successful, and was there for three years before securing my new role this summer. When I started, it was a full-time position but they were aware that I was doing the MA and only half way through. They gave me one day off a week to complete it, so I was part-time for around six months. As soon as the taught aspect was finished and I was working on the dissertation, I went back up to five days a week.”

Jake says that having that support at the start of his career while still studying was important. He said: “They were very keen and enthusiastic and supportive of giving me that help when they made the offer of the job. That gave me a lot of hope that I was going to be able to do both my job and my degree, and was going to have the best of both worlds. That support continued through the degree and I had regular chats about my workload and how I was keeping up with the demands of the job itself. I was completely supported throughout.

“UCL are also aware that a lot of the students on the MA are either in full or part-time employment and they are very accommodating in making sure that our student workload is manageable and that we are not being caused any undue stress, anxiety or worry. They can be flexible with deadlines if there are mitigating circumstances. It was a really good experience on both sides.”

Balancing education and employment has had other benefits for Jake, who says: “During my first Master’s degree I would be fairly relaxed about deadlines. Because I was doing that full time, I gave myself a lot of leeway in terms of completing tasks.

“The switch between that and the MA at UCL while working full time meant that I had to be much more structured in my approach to studying and personal timekeeping. That has definitely carried through into my professional role. I am now full time and do not have the MA aspect any more, but I am still very focused on deadlines and making sure I am utilising my time to its maximum capacity. I look at a task and think about how I can use my time effectively – to not only complete it, but also see where I can take on other things and support colleagues. It’s important that I have a structured approach to the tasks.”

The right direction

Although Jake has recently taken up a new position with a different legal organisation he says that he has learnt a huge amount from his first job in the sector. When he first made the decision to become an information professional he wasn’t sure about which direction to take, but was interested in government services. However, he now feels that veering from that defined career path to move into the world of corporate legal information has allowed him to develop new skills and understanding.

He says: “When I started at library school I didn’t really have an idea of where I wanted to end up after my degree. I think a lot of people do have a clear path and know exactly where they want to go. But there are probably more graduates than there are jobs, so my big bit of advice would be to keep an open mind as to where you could find employment within the information profession.

“About two weeks before my interview for my last position, I had no idea that corporate law firms existed, and was not aware that this was an area of library work that I could do. It was only when I was going through a recruitment agency that the idea of law libraries was brought to my attention. They said there is this area of work that has lots of opportunities for someone who may want to get into government libraries. Law libraries are very similar, they are very research based and there is a lot of scope for training and development.

“Some of the things I have learnt during my time with the firm are things that I could never have imagined when I started the job. If I had followed that structured path that I had set out for myself, then I probably wouldn’t have ended up in this sector and wouldn’t have had that opportunity to expand my knowledge.”

Be inspired

That willingness to learn and develop on the job was evident right from the start, providing inspiration for Jake’s dissertation, which looked at the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the legal information profession.

“Technology and law was an area that I had never considered before,” he says. “My dissertation was focused on the impact that new technologies are having on legal information professionals. I noticed there was a gap in terms of academic and commercial literature. Most of the writing on the subject focused solely on the legal profession itself – lawyers, paralegals, partners and even professors of law, but there was very little on the role of AI on the information profession and I was interested to see why that was the case. I wanted to make a case for the profession to be involved with AI tools.”

And serendipity also plays a role in any career, providing unexpected opportunities, and for Jake that came through CILIP’s recently published Research Report written by Dr Andrew Cox, The impact of AI, machine learning, automation and robotics on the information profession. Jake explains that he had been in contact with CILIP’s Chief Development Officer Jo Cornish over social media, but when the two met face-to-face at an event “we struck up a conversation and she was aware of my interest in AI. She reached out and said this report is happening and we need contributors and I was really happy to get involved and represent the Legal information sector.”

Jake sees a role for information professionals in the implementation of that AI technology, saying: “I can imagine that in the UK there will be a need for librarians, information professionals to upskill and get more involved in understanding some of the basics – such as coding. As more law firms begin to adopt AI technology – machine learning and automation – We are professionals well placed within the organisations we work to show end-users how to use these technologies and understand them better.

“We are there to not only provide information, but also to evaluate and scrutinise it. We want to make sure that the end-users are receiving timely and accurate information, and I believe our skills as information professionals will enable us to work with, and alongside, these new technologies that are enhancing workflows and streamlining routine tasks across a broad spectrum of sectors. There is a niche for us as a profession in that area.” Training end-users is already part of the service delivered by the information service, and Jake sees AI literacy as an extension of that – similar to digital literacy in public libraries, and information literacy in the health and academic sectors.

Stay connected

Beyond training, Jake says: “Current awareness was a big part of the role as well, so a lot of my morning was spent using software to gather information and important news updates on specific sectors, and disseminating that to particular areas in email bulletin format. Similar to other libraries, each information professional works closely with specific legal practice areas, so I liaised with commercial litigation, the international and UK energy teams, innovation and legal technology, and construction. Working and assisting in vastly different practice areas was really interesting. I got an in-depth overview into each of those practice areas; the types of work they were doing, and was able to tailor the services we provided in the library to meet their specific requirements.”

Knowledge Management is also crucial for the legal information profession, ensuring that the value of internal knowledge is maximised. This means making that knowledge discoverable and usable, largely through model documents (contracts, templates, letters etc.) that are captured and profiled accurately on the intranet.

The firm offers a research service to both solicitors and business support across all of its nine offices. Jake says: “The library enquiry desk, where research requests are sent to, is staffed 8.30am-6pm, Monday to Friday. It can field any number of different information requests that come in during those hours. Some are quite simple tasks – such as running a bankruptcy search against an individual or running a winding up search against a company.

“That service also caters to more in-depth research requests, where we are asked specific legal questions and our job is to provide information in the form of journal articles, book chapters, case law, legislation, etc., that might potentially hold the answer to that question.”

Jake tries to stay connected with the work of the solicitors and will follow the same RSS and email alerts that they are receiving, but adds that he also keeps on top of his own profession’s current awareness. He says: “I follow the work of CILIP and keep up to date with networks such as BIALL and CLIG (City Legal information group). I think you have to make a decision about what you read. I don’t read everything but I do make a conscious effort to keep myself informed.”

While no route into the profession is the same, there are some paths that feel familiar and as Jake points out if you “keep an open mind” then opportunities will arise. It’s up to you what you do with those opportunities.