As many of you probably know by now, there was a shake-up at the Thomson Reuters Legal (West) Library Relations Team where about half of the team was laid off. The changes at TR Legal went well beyond this specific team, but since many of us personally know some of the team, it was this transition that immediately caught our attention. When something similar happened back in January, Anne Ellis sent me an email explaining the decision and what the plans were going forward. I asked Anne yesterday to let me know about this round of layoffs, and she asked Chris Cartrell, Vice President for Sales and Account Management, to respond to my question. Below is Chris’ email and I am now sharing that with you.

Hey Greg,
I hope you are well. Anne forwarded your information request on to me. I am sorry that I could not respond yesterday but we were still communicating with individuals that had job changes. I hope you can appreciate our need to communicate with each individual before responding in a public forum.
I believe your specific question was related to our Library Relations team. We made some changes within our sales and account management organization this week which will help us better respond to the changing marketplace. And as you noted, the librarian relations program was not immune to the changes. We did create several new opportunities and positions, but there were also some positions eliminated. Library Relation Managers are a core part of how we service our clients – as are our reference attorneys, research specialists, account managers and sales executives. We have had to adjust our customer-facing roles to address the core changes the legal marketplace has seen in the past several years, while looking broadly at our work with customers to make sure we are providing excellent service and training as efficiently as possible. We remain deeply committed to fostering the library community through innovation, service, product excellence and corporate citizenship. To that extent, all of the recent changes in our service approach are intended to meet the changing needs of librarians.
The changes we made this week are centered in two areas: 
1) We have to utilize all of our resources to service our clients, and 
2) we must do a better job of servicing the growing branch offices of our clients. 
This week’s changes aligned our resources across the company to give us greater coverage to more firms and more librarians. Specifically, we have increased our dedicated coverage to branch offices six-fold. Our librarians have consistently requested that we assist them with more in-house training, e-learning, on-demand virtual support options, and greater support of branch offices. The moves we have taken this week help us achieve these goals.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any other questions. Obviously, these are difficult decisions, but we do feel that these changes allow us the best opportunity to service you better. We are working closely with employees affected by these decisions to help them transition to their next role, either with Thomson Reuters or outside the business.
(Please feel free to post this entire email via your blog.)
Thank you,
Chris
Chris CartrettVice President, Sales and Account Management
Large and Medium Law Firms
Thomson Reuters